Buying and Flipping Grandma’s House » Episode 922

Real estate and senior living can be like peanut butter and chocolate if you do it right. But it can be a terrible disaster where you come off looking like a jerk if you mess it up. That’s why the approach you have when you talk to buyers and senior living professionals must be completely different than the normal real estate investor approach.

For 22 years, Phillip Vincent has been a fix and flipper in St. Louis, and for the last 9 years, he’s focused solely on the senior living niche. From the moment a family finds out that mom has to move into a senior living facility, that family moves into crisis mode to take care of her. And as they figure out which home to place her in, they realize that they can’t afford to do it unless they sell all of her stuff and her house. That’s the point when Phillip steps in. He buys grandma’s house as-is and flips it.

Every time you see a crane go up to build a 280-bed senior living facility, you should also be seeing the hundreds of homes those seniors need to sell so that they can move in. And while a family might want to sell their mom’s house on their own, it can be incredibly hard for them to juggle cleaning out a home, finding a contractor to rehab it, funding the gap between grandma’s pension and the senior living facility she’s living in, and doing all of this from out of town while still managing their regular life.

Phillip has carefully cultivated relationships with a variety of stakeholders across this industry, but he wants to warn you to be careful in this real estate niche. Family dynamics, guilt, and trust are delicate issues you have to work around when you make offers on senior homes, but when folks realize that you can unlock the equity in grandma’s house, then you’re a godsend in their world.

What’s Inside:

—How to get referrals from inside the senior living community world.

—The secret to getting your mom into a community that takes Medicaid.

—The approach Philip takes to networking with attorneys and senior living facilitators.

—The difference between pre-probate and probate leads.