Make sure you understand all the costs before embarking on home flipping By Ilyce Glink and Samuel J. Tamkin September 24 Q : My wife and I currently live in the Northern Virginia area and will be retiring soon. We plan to move to the Raleigh. We both enjoy watching shows about buying fixer-uppers. We're wondering how we might go about locating a company to help us fix up homes in the Raleigh area. How would we be able to check out the creativity and quality of their work? Anything else we should think about? Thank you. A : We, too, have watched and enjoyed shows on TV that generally depict the process of buying homes, renovating those homes and then selling them for a profit as a positive experience. Life always seems to work out — and typically in 60 minutes or less. But “reality” TV is one thing, and the real world of real estate is quite another. We're not saying that what you see on TV is not real, but you have to be a little skeptical. Real estate purc...
