PLEASE FLIP ME OFF

Because the blame game can be so easily re-written to suit a politicians needs, "flippers" are now the scourge of the earth. While I'd like to thank them for taking my place in that line as a real estate/mortgage broker, the fact that these folks are now being blamed for the ills of the market crash, and the terrible idea that they may bring prices back up now (the nerve of them sustaining a market), are mis-informed at best. And if your first name has the abbreviation Sen. or Rep. or Attny.Gen. ahead of it, wake up *Editor's note* If your name is Sen. Bob Dutton, thank you for being a visionary and not a reactionary. Keep up the good work.

"Flippers" are the folks, generally mom-n-pop contracting businesses, that use their own money to purchase the nastiest of the nasty repo'ed homes and fix them up. Let me take a moment to dispel a rumor here:

Rumor: When you bid on a repo, you probably won't get it because the evil flippers are going to outbit you and pay cash. WRONG. Generally flippers aren't interested in the home you want to move into. They are interested in the home you can't move into. If you've been out house hunting and walked into a home that looks like the "after" photo of a nuclear test site and smells like a sewage treatment plant, you couldn't get a loan on that home if you wanted. Your lender is extremely leery of what they deem as Health and Safety Standards. BUT, a flipper is paying cash...his own cash...in full... to buy this lil' gem, put thousands more into it to make it habitable, and then put it back on the market.

If you live in a neighborhood near a house that looks like it belongs in an Appalachian hollow more than Suburbia,USA, you should HOPE a flipper buys that house. In fact, you should take him a plate of cookies and coffee to keep him full and caffeinated. There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of these uninhabitable homes on the market right now. And over the next few years, there's many more to come. Some how the idea that a person is willing to risk their own money (amounts that have a comma and at LEAST two digits to the left of it), fix up a home while lessening blight has become a bad thing. And it's bad because heaven forbid, that person wants to make a profit on it. The gall of a person wanting to be a capitalist! Wherever did that idea come from?

So next time you walk into a house that smells freshly painted, has new carpet, a shiny air conditioning unit in the back, a freshly sodded yard, and/or an electric panel that won't shoot an arc through the entire house when you flip a switch, thank a flipper.