Flop that House

If you ever watch HGTV or A&E or TLC, you'll notice a particular genre of TV show, the renovate or sell show, or house flipping.

Basically what they do is find a house, renovate it, put in new appliances, do some landscaping and sell it.

When the housing market was hot, this wasn't a bad plan, if you had access to competent contractors and had a feel for housing. But you had to factor in delays, inspection problems and the like.

Those who hired professionals did well, they managed to make out ok, but the people who tried to do it on the cheap always ran into snags.

Also, there seems to be something that turns a lot of these people into pricks. They're running a project, they have people working for them, and all of a sudden, they're Donald Trump.

One of the things which happens is that people don't get that this is a tricky business. Some houses hide really big, expensive flaws. Others are the wrong house for the neighborhood. And then there is the woman factor. Women tend to get shittier deals because they don't know the details and the male contractors don't take them seriously. So people ignore them.

But what interested me most was that most of these shows were shot last year or in the early part of this year, before the bubble began to burst. Now I'm wondering what these people will do when they have these houses, have put 30k in them and still can't sell them. You see a lot of small empire building here, people who got lucky and don't realize it. They invest in a few houses, and think they have a clue about this. And now with a declining market, I wonder if they have any idea what may happen