Flipping homes is one of the most lucrative investment strategies you can make. I stress that statement with one caveat, though: You absolutely must do your due diligence and your homework before you invest. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the hardest part about flipping homes is not the financing. (That's actually the easy part, because you don't even need to use your own credit or your own money.) The hardest part is not even doing the actual rehab work to fix up the foreclosure property and getting it back on the market. The hardest part is not even the negotiation or the bidding process. If you've done your homework, negotiation is really a matter of having the interpersonal communications skills to convey to the seller that you want to help them out.

The hardest part about flipping homes is doing the research and making the determination whether or not a particular property is worth investing in. Once you make the decision to either pass on a particular house or to go forward with the negotiation process, it becomes a matter of statistical numbers, salesmanship, and a bit of luck.

Many a time have foreclosure real estate investors been burned by neglecting to do their homework before investing in a particular parcel of real estate. Novice investors have a tendency to get emotionally attached to particular deals for some reason. Perhaps they like the house. Perhaps they think this house is a guaranteed home run and will net them with a nice decent five- or even six-figure profit. But when they actually sign the paperwork and handover the money to do the deal, the nightmare begins.

The house may need far more repairs than originally anticipated, and the investor had not bothered to do a visual walk-through of the house, or did not buy the house with a low enough loan-to-value (LTV) margin to leave room for repairs before flipping it. Or, the house is in a neighborhood or market where homes are sitting for upwards of six months at a stretch before being sold, and the investor ends up making monthly payments on the house that eat into his or her profits, and ends up having to rent out the place for less than the monthly payments on the mortgage are.

The house may have had an encumbrance on it such as a judgment lien or a second or third mortgage, and the investor didn't bother to conduct a title search to ensure clean title.

Or quite simply, the homeowner just didn't do a CMA (comparative market analysis) properly and didn't buy the house at a low enough percentage below market value in order to make the deal profitable.

You may have heard the expression from various foreclosure gurus that you make your money on an investment when you buy it, not when you sell it. In other words, what that means is that you should only be buying assets that have equity that can be realized.

Research is one of the single most important aspects of the foreclosure investing business. When done properly, you will find riches beyond your wildest dreams. When done improperly, you are digging a deeper hole for yourself financially. I know from personal experience, having done foreclosure investing, the sad reality of this fact. As a rookie investor, my first couple of deals I barely made a few pennies on. I was lucky that I didn't end up losing my shirt. I walked away with a few bucks. This was because I hadn't done the math right in my calculations because more was owed on the house than I previously thought. On another deal, I ended up paying more in repairs than I had anticipated, because I had never been inside the house before the homeowner deeded the house over to me. But then on my next deals, because I had done my homework properly (having learned from my mistakes with my previous deals), I was able to get into deals with a much healthier profit margin. A healthy profit margin is very important to maintain when doing your calculations. You can almost always expect that, due to factors beyond your control, you have the potential to make less on a deal than the numbers tell you that you will on paper. If you think you will net $20,000 on a particular property, you might end up only making $10,000 or $15,000, or who knows, maybe even less.

That is why research is important. That is why it is important to use a reliable foreclosure listing service that provides reliable and accurate data. Yes I could go to the courthouse and research the deals myself, but rather than spend countless hours looking through files from 8am to 4pm on weekdays, I would rather use my valuable time to evaluate pre-researched deals, make go / no-go decisions on each deal based on the researched information, and then focus more of my time on the actual process of making offers. If you want to be a successful real estate investor, you will learn that if you want to do a volume of deals, you will need to outsource some of your tasks. The easiest one to outsource is the compilation of foreclosure listings and researching of the deals. (You don't have to train anyone to do it, because there are services out there that already do this for you.)

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