Almost every investment property needs some kind of repairs, but here's the problem.

If you underestimate the cost of those repairs, it could be tens of thousands of dollars out of your pocket

that you may not even have. So in this video, I'm interviewing an investor who's also been a contractor

for over 30 years to get her advice and her budget spreadsheet to help us estimate remodel costs

on fixer upper rental properties and fix and flip properties.

And we're getting started right now.

Welcome to the podcast Real Estate Investing with Coach Carson.

I'm your host Chad Carson.

You can also call me Coach Carson.

And this is a show to help you get out of the financial grind so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. Now let's go straight to my interview with Don Macy. There's this idea that when you buy a rental property, it can be a great deal and you want to go buy it, and it seems like the numbers make sense, but then you get under this big gray area of like, I don't know how much it's going to cost to

fix this property up. So I want to tackle this question with you to help people out. I want to go two different directions. One where we assume that we don't even own the property yet. We're about to make an offer on it. And then I want to dig into what happens once you get the property on a contract. And so based on your experience, Don, you bought a lot of properties. You just finished a flip on a property, which people can check out on your Instagram channel.

you're going to give me the high level of I'm going to buy a property, but I'm going to not even own it yet. I'm going to make an offer on it. How would you start thinking about that? What kind of things would you start looking at to be able to estimate the cost for your modeling of property? Really, when you think about it, budget is one of the most important

things in terms of the execution phase, not the property management phase, but the execution phase.

When I analyze a property, first of all, I ask, what is the purpose of this property? And if you

don't know yet, you need to get really crystal clear before you place an offer on a property. What is your purpose? So it could be buy and hold, it could be flip, or it could be you're going to live in it. And so those three combinations are completely different kinds of budgets. And that's really, really important for you to know beyond a shadow of doubt. That's what you're going to do. Now, you can have a fallback. you can say, okay, I'm going to flip it if it doesn't work out as a buy and hold, but you do have to go into a certain mindset.

So with that said, after you know your purpose, then from there you decide a very broad category

of budget. I do kind of back of napkin because you have to make these decisions so fast. And back

of napkin means, you know, Chad, you probably have some experience with this too. You have to come up

with something. And I rely a lot of my experience because I've done this so much, but somebody that

might be new or only one or two doors in, they don't have that confidence yet. You have to

look at age of property. And I think as

these properties are getting more difficult to find, the age becomes super important. So you're

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