“The Deed” host Sidney Torres has $100 million of his own money in the real estate market right now, and also some advice for you.
“It’s best to find a local architect, mom-and-pop, that you can get a fixed fee to take you from the beginning to the end,” he told us, “and let them be your point person instead of the contractor.”
Since Season 2 will delve more into financials than the first one, a maturation that makes a lot of sense for CNBC, TheWrap asked hard-money lender Torres for the worst way he sees first-time homebuyers cheap out on renovation projects.
“A lot of people think, ‘Well, I’ve got a brother that’s a contractor, I’ve got a friend that’s a contractor, I’ve got an uncle that’s a contractor,’” Torres said. “That is the worst thing you can do because at the end of the day, to me, you need someone who’s separate and apart from the building. You need someone who is… making sure the permitting is done properly, that there’s no zoning issues. You need to bring in that person on the front end.”
In an effort to provide a good “deed” to those not selected for his TV series, Torres is dropping an app midseason that will be helpful to uninitiated house-flippers.
His IV Real Estate app will cover six steps from buying, fixing, and selling a home, with a heavy focus in that value-engineering aspect Torres says will be the key focus on the show’s sophomore season. The still-in-development app covers basic steps like budgeting and location identification, and contains a helpful on-site scheduler tool — but it also includes valuable templates for important and little-known documentation, like a penalty clause contract.
“It’s so important that you have a penalty clause contract in every single one of your subcontractor’s contracts. They need to have a start date and a finish date,” Torres explained it to us. “If they go over the finish date then they’re penalized up to $100 to $200 a day, for every day that they’re not there on the schedule that they promised.”
Tough? Sure, but that’s how your goals grow from owning a home with a white-picket fence to seemingly half of New Orleans.
Catch more advice from Torres starting tonight at 10/9c on CNBC’s “The Deed.”