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Comment by electricslpnsld | Hacker News Reader

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspects of the work and seeing a house go from a beat up old husk to a shiny new place! I have to contract out some of the work (electrical mostly) because I'm not a certified electrician, but otherwise it is a one man show.

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Depending on the country you are in, it shouldn't be that hard to become a certified electrician.

Granted, I have a degree in electrical engineering, but certification was not part of that degree. I got the certification at a night school, IIRC it took 2 months with about ~5 hours per week in effort. If you don't have experience with electronics it would obviously take a bit more effort, but it's totally doable.

I've considered it! Our local community college offers classes like this for pretty cheap, maybe when I'm done with the current place.

Besides, I've fixed / expanded / rearranged my own electrical wiring more than once (which is legal here without a license, if you do it on own property for non-commercial purposes) and I didn't use any of my electronics knowledge. You just need to know what the wire colors mean, employ some basic safety procedures, and don't do stupid things with wire size and currents.

Well the first rule of electrical work is to assume an idiot or a cheapskate did the original work (or most recent repair) and the colors have a fifty-fifty chance of lying to you...

Any tips on house selection? What do you stay away from when looking at candidates?

How many weekends does it typically take before you're ready to sell?

This sounds like something I'd do even if it just barely covered costs (including a reasonable per-hour time cost).

I look for smaller places that I can handle on my own (2 bedroom max), no major structural/foundational issues that would require bringing an engineer in, no demolition that would require an engineer, that kind of thing. Finding an inspector that you trust and that knows their stuff is really key here. Basically the same kind of things you would look for when investing in house flips (which is really all I'm doing, just for fun on my own).

Do you have any before and after shots you can share?

Do you have a real estate license, for making the purchase before flipping?

Would it make more sense to rent them out rather than sell?

I would then have to deal with finding tenants, property maintenance issues, etc (or pay someone to do this), which is more than I really want to do right now. At that point I would be closer to a full time landlord, not a full-time software engineer who enjoys working on houses on the side!

Run the numbers and compare in your next sale. As a rule of thumb if you can get 1% of the sale price per month in rent you’re doing awesome.

And a good property manager should take away 95% of the hassle.

You're saying that if the house sold for $500,000, you should keep it if you can rent it for $5,000 / month or more?

I've heard of 5% of 1/12th of the projected sale price, which seems more realistic.

Yes $5000/month would make that a great property. Look up the one percent rule.

There are lots of other things to consider but it’s a great quick rule of thumb.

A coworker found a company that handles most of it, and they call when they're tasked with fixing something, he then figures out if he wants to pay them to fix it or what have you, or if he just wants to do it himself. He says it's basically paying for his rent. Of course it's all about researching the companies. Worse case you sell off the house. Totally worth looking into though.

The answer to this is usually complicated.

Being a landlord has a totally different skillset...

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