Fixer-upper homes are not as easy or profitable as shows like This Old House on Flip This House would have you believe. The Wall Street Journal agrees that fixers are rarely profitable, citing a This Old House project that went $350,000 over budget.

Can you make money in fixers? Yes, if you do it the way this books says. For some reason, all the other books on the subject make it sound easier than it really is. The main big point is you cannot buy “fixers” and make them not need any more fixing and thereby make an adequate profit. What you must do in the real world, is buy disasters and turn them into “fixers” and at that point sell them for a profit.

Unless they are disasters that make your competitors for buying them—newlyweds—run away, you cannot buy them cheap enough to make a profit after all your work. Furthermore, taking them from disaster to perfect is not profitable. Just take them out of the disaster category.

101 pages, 8 1/2 x 11 paperback, $29.95

"One newsletter I love to read is John T. Reed's Real Estate Investor's Monthly. He's a smart man, a funny writer, and always provocative."
Jane Bryant Quinn, Newsweek personal finance columnist

• Reader comments about Fixers
• Table of Contents
• Front Matter (Copyright date, acknowledgements, etc.)
• Index
• Errata
• John T. Reed’s real estate investment background

 This is one of two books I have on adding value to a property as a way to make extra profit. The other is How to Increase the Value of Real Estate. The Fixers book used to be part of the Increase Value book but it was too complex just to be a chapter. So the Increase Value book does not also cover fixers any more. It covers the many other ways to change the property cost-effectively so as to increase its sale price.

When you buy 2 books at the same time, you save $2.55 on shipping to U.S. addresses. Shipping is free if you buy 3 or more books at the same time.