I Flipped a House to Find Out If It Beat Lending. Here’s Every Number.

I’ve been on the private lending side of this business for a just over a year now. I underwrite other people’s flips and have funded 19 deals so far.

But I’d never done one.

So in June I bought 124 Ridgeland Drive in North Augusta (a 2007 detitled double-wide manufactured home) with two goals. The first was to actually live the entire process I underwrite to know what that it really feels like. The second was money: I wanted to see if I could roughly triple what the same dollars earn sitting in a note.

It sold on September 11, 2026 for $189,000. If you’re one of my current borrowers or a brand new investor, you’re about to see exactly what I make exactly how I did against my own underwriting standards. Some of that isn’t flattering.

The deal

I bought it cash, though Hard Money South on June 2, 2026. Closed the sale 101 days later.

Acquisition

Rehab

Carry: Insurance, power, water, taxes over the hold: $960. (More on why that number is rounded in a minute.)

All-in: $143,871.87

The sale

Net profit: $28,916.42.

That’s a 20.1% return on cash in 101 days, and a 15.3% margin on the sale price.

Did it beat lending?

My blended yield (12% APR + 1% to 2.5% origination fee) across the loan book is currently 14.5%. Had that same $143,872 sat in notes for those 101 days instead, it would have earned about $5,773.

The flip earned $28,916. That’s $23,144 more or roughly 5x what the money would have made in a note over the same window, and about 72.6% annualized against my 14.5%.

I was aiming for 3x but got 5x. So mission accomplished, and I’d encourage you to be skeptical of that sentence anyway, for three reasons.

First, annualizing a 101-day return is more like a story, not a fact. 72.6% assumes I can find, fund, fix, and sell 3.6 of these a year, back to back forever. I’ve since bought two more properties and I can tell you plainly that I can’t…one of them isn’t even going to be a flip…at least not for 12 months. My notes earn 14.5% whether I get out of bed or not. This flip earned 20.1%, once, only because I spent a summer on it. Deals with gaps between them don’t annualize.

Second, my labor is in that number at a price of zero. I coordinated some of the subs myself instead of running everything through the GC and got my hands very dirty, which is part of why the rehab came in where it did. That $23,144 of excess return is really $23,144 minus whatever my time was worth. Lending requires very little of that time.

Third, one number in there is genuinely better than I’ve shown it. I calculated return against the full $143,872 as though every dollar was tied up for all 101 days. It wasn’t; rehab money went out in pieces over the summer. Average capital employed was lower, so the true return on deployed capital is a bit better than 20.1%. I’m leaving it conservative on purpose.

Now the part where I grade my own underwriting

If a borrower had brought me this deal, here’s what I’d have said.

I overpaid, by my own rule. Hard Money South underwrites to the 72% rule: max offer = ARV × 0.72 − rehab. At purchase I was targeting a $185,000 ARV with roughly $30,500 of rehab. That puts max allowable offer at $102,705. I paid $110,000. I was $7,295 over my own benchmark on day one.

I got away with it because the house sold for $189,000 ($4,000 above the ARV I underwrote). That is not because of my skill level. That’s the market covering for me. Break-even on this deal was about $157,400; I had room, but less than I’d have wanted if the appraisal had come in soft or the market had cooled more in August.

I paid $11,000 for the deal. The purchase included an $11,000 assignment fee of sorts. The seller saw roughly $99,000. Had I found this house myself or been more conservative with my bid, I’d have probably been under my 72% number instead of $7,295 over it: the entire overpay was the acquisition fee. That’s the single highest-leverage thing I’d change. Everything downstream is just execution. But then again I would not have learned so quickly. 

The inspection had a big hole where the roof should have been, so to speak. The rehab estimate for the roof line item came back at $0 not “roof is in good condition,” just empty. I mean, it looked good but what do I know about roofs. On a 2007 manufactured home, a blank roof line isn’t a data point, it’s a missing one, and a roof on this thing would have eaten most of my margin.

Erin Church, my listing agent and one hell of a real estate investor and advisor, chased it down rather than assuming. It turned out to be a fairly new roof in very good shape, and it’s the reason there’s no roof line in my rehab table. That’s the happy version of this story. The lesson holds either way: Go answer it before you close, not after.

The HVAC I did sorta see coming. 19+ years old, heavy coil corrosion, almost certainly R-22. I priced a full replacement at $6,600 going in and that’s what it cost. This is what good pre-purchase diligence buys you: not a cheaper repair but not expensive either, just no surprise.

My carrying costs are an estimate. I modeled $320/month across a 3-month hold and called it $960. The hold was 3.3 months, so it should have been about $1,062 and I carried $0 for lawn maintenance through a South Carolina June, July, and August, which is not a thing that happens, because I was the lawn crew. It’s a couple hundred dollars. It didn’t change the outcome. But I tracked $30,494.87 of rehab to the penny and then eyeballed my carry, and that’s exactly the kind of asymmetry I’d flag on a borrower’s sheet.

The $7,179 I didn’t budget for

Two line items at the end deserve their own section, because first-time flippers never plan for them.

I gave the buyer a $6,079 closing-cost credit. And I bought a ~$1,100 refrigerator so the appliance package matched. If I had listened to Erin, I probably would have seen some of this coming.

That’s $7,179 (a quarter of my entire profit) spent getting from “under contract” to “closed.” Neither one is in anybody’s scope of work. Neither one shows up in a rehab estimate. All-in, my total cost of sale was $16,211.71, or 8.58% of the sale price. That’s the real friction number, and if you’re modeling 6% because that’s what commission is, you’re short by about $5,000 on a deal this size.

One related habit, and it’s the most useful thing in this post: tie your spreadsheet back to the closing disclosure, line by line, before you believe your own profit number. Concessions and credits have a way of showing up in two places at once, or in neither. The model is a forecast. The CD is what happened.

So what am I doing now?

I’m still lending. That’s the business, and 14.5% passive is a good business. Good but not great.

So I’m not done flipping. Since Ridgeland closed I’ve picked up two more properties through Hard Money South, one in Jackson SC at a foreclosure auction and one another manufactured home on Running Creek Dr, also in North Augusta, that I learned about from Gene Martin, another fine local RE investor. Between them they’re already teaching me things Ridgeland didn’t: the Jackson house, which is stick-built, came with a surprise tenant in place (a hard-of-hearing, but very nice, octogenarian who previously owned the home) which makes me a residential landlord for the length of his six-month lease, so it’s looking less like the quick flip I wanted and more like something I will hold for at least 12 months. Not every acquisition exits the way you sketched it on the drive home but at least there’s a upside with long-term capital gains and all.

Here’s my current plan: I’m going to do 2-3 flips per year, for 2-3 years, and then I’m probably going to stop.

Not because it doesn’t work. The numbers (so far at least) say it works. I’m doing it because it’s genuinely fun right now, and the reason it’s fun is that all of it is new. Every deal so far has taught me something I couldn’t have learned funding one. I’m a better lender than I was in May, that’s for sure.

But it is a lot of work. Real hard work (demoing bathtubs with a sledgehammer, driving out to meet some guy for some thing, buying supplies at daybreak to keep things moving). Lending doesn’t ask that of me. There’s a point where the learning curve flattens out and what’s left is just the labor, and when I get there I expect I’ll go back to doing the thing that pays 14.5% while I enjoy a few cold ones at the pub.

Until then, two lessons I’d share with a first-time flipper.

Your exit costs more than you think. Budget 8.5%, not 6%.

Your model is a forecast, not a result. Reconcile it to the closing disclosure before you tell anyone, including yourself, what you made.

The money was real. $28,916 on $143,872 in 101 days. I did do it again, twice.

I just bought the next ones cheaper (I hope).