How do you estimate repair cost for a real estate investment when you're buying a fixer

upper property, whether it's a house you're going to flip or a house you're going to keep

as a rental? That's the question for today's Ask Coach episode, and we're getting started right now.

Welcome to the Ask Coach edition of the Real Estate and Financial Independence Podcast.

I'm your host, Chad Carson. You can always call me Coach Carson. And this is a show all about investing in real estate, achieving financial independence, and doing more of what matters.

Today's question is a very common one for real estate investors.

It's also a very good one.

I remember when I first started investing real estate, this was one of the biggest

challenges.

I had never remodeled anything.

I had never made a punch list.

I'd never estimated to spend a bunch of money.

And I was nervous about, you know, how am I going to estimate how much I'm going to have to fix up for this fixed repper property? What's the cost of it? Am I going to estimate too low and then run out of money? And so it is an important topic. And in short, this is a skill you're going to have to develop over time. And I'm going to give you a couple answers. I'm going to give you a

really quick resource answer that you can go to do more homework on this. And then I'm going to try

to explain a little bit to how this process works and what you can start studying and learning about.

The quick answer is, there's a book on this. And it's one that I highly recommend by Jay Scott. He's a really good real estate investor. He wrote the book for Bigger Pockets called The Book on Flipping Houses, but the book I'm thinking about is called The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs. You can get that on Amazon. You can get it on bigger pockets. I'll have a link to it in the show description. And I highly recommend having that on your shelf and

studying it. But within that book, I'll give you sort of the rundown on what kind of skill you

develop when you study that. Essentially what Jay teaches you how to do, and this is the system I

use as well, is when you're looking at a property, he breaks it down into 25 different components. So you can think about it like the roof is one

component, the gutters and the soffit, kind of that area, that trim area around the edge of the roof

is another component. The windows are a component. The lawn and landscaping is a component. So you break

down the entire property, almost think about like chopping it into pieces

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