As a real estate investor, your primary goal is to achieve a positive return on investment (ROI). The main premise of FlipScout is that it teaches you how to find high ROI houses to flip, which makes it very well suited to fix-and-flip and fix-to-rent investors. But the question is, does it actually deliver? The goal of this review is to put FlipScout to the test.
Part 1 – Signing Up
Although FlipScout is entirely free to use, you do need to create an account with New Silver (the creators of FlipSout) in order to start using the Software. All in all, the sign up process is relatively painless, but you will need to verify your email address in order to sign in. Once this is done and dusted, you should automatically be directed to the search page.
Part 2 – Searching For Properties
We will be the first to admit that the search page is a little bit bare bones. New Silver have more than likely taken their cue from Google, but with the absence of a logo in the middle of the page, it does feel a bit empty.
Regardless of the somewhat barren search page, it’s pretty simple to start searching for a property. There are three primary ways to search for properties.
Method 1: Zip Code
This is probably the best way to search for a property using FlipScout.
Method 2: City
If you just want to search using your target city, this option is also available to you.
Method 3: Address
If you know the specific street address, you can also simply enter it. With that being said, this way of searching can be somewhat limited. If you don’t find any results this way, try the zip code option before increasing the radius to the city.
Part 3: Sorting Through Results
The biggest weakness of FlipScout seems to be the time needed to deliver the results. While the final results were good, it took a bit longer than a standard search engine would normally take. Hopefully the New Silver team will find a way to speed up the search time in future.
However, once the results are loaded on your screen, you should find it very easy to navigate. Everything is nicely laid out, and you can quickly see the following attributes:
Reason For Listing: In most cases, the property is either a pre-foreclosure or a price reduction.
Estimated ROI: Each listing has a predicted ROI displayed in the bottom left corner of the image. This makes it very simple to sort through the properties. It’s the kind of filter that most property investors will appreciate.
Property Price & Details: You are also be able to quickly see the following:
- Property Price
- Number of bedrooms
- Number of bathrooms
- Property size
- Address
These are all staples of a property search engine, so it’s obviously good to have everything nicely packaged on the results page.
Part 4: Analyzing An Individual Property
This is where FlipScout really shines. The individual property pages are packed with details that can help you assess the viability of purchasing the home. This includes:
Estimated Property Value: A quick estimate of how much the property is worth.
Assessed Value: The value of a home for tax purposes
ROI: Potential ROI based after Rehab work has been completed
Profit Amount: How much you can make after reselling the house
Rehab Estimate: A quick prediction of how much the renovation will cost
Days on Market: How many days has the property been listed for sale
Value of Comparable Properties: You can get a better sense of the after repair value of the property by analyzing all the comps (comparable properties in the area). Fortunately, FlipScout makes this very easy to do, by listing the comps at the bottom of the page.
Final Thoughts:
All in all, FlipScout does ultimately deliver on its promise of helping investors find high ROI properties to flip. While the loading time of the search page could be a bit faster, once the results are in, you should be pleasantly surprised.
For a free house flipping search engine from a relatively young company, New Silver has created a good base to build from. More importantly, FlipScout can help you find your next property flip. That’s what it promises to do, and that is what it does. From our perspective, you can’t really ask for more than that.
