Turning down homeowner kitchens to keep two slots open for investor rehabs

halyard, third door you didn't list. Unit turns and repair work for property managers.

It's not glamorous and the margins per job are thin, but it fills the dead weeks between your bigger rehabs and the schedule is mine to give you, so I'm not calling you at 6pm. I keep two crews on a standing arrangement and neither of them markets to homeowners at all. The turn work is the floor under their payroll and the rehabs are the profit.

The part that matters for you at three guys: managers pay slower than flippers on hard money but far more reliably than homeowners waiting on a HELOC. Ask any manager you approach how many days from invoice to check and then ask one of their existing vendors the same question.

What's a draw? I have no crew and no license, and I've seen the term in three threads now and I've been assuming it's just a payment.

juniper, a draw is a payment released against work already in place, usually inspected. Investor borrows rehab money, lender holds it, GC finishes the framing, someone verifies it, money comes out. So the GC is funding that stage out of pocket first.

halyard, five years in and I'll say the two businesses thing is real but not for the reason people say. Skills carry over fine. What doesn't carry over is the office. Homeowner work needs selections tracking, change order paperwork a civilian can read, and someone answering the phone with patience. Investor work needs scheduling and a bid template. I tried to run both out of one inbox and the homeowner jobs suffered because they were the ones that needed the attention.

Also your concentration number is worse than you think. If you have four investor clients, in practice two of them are 70 percent of your revenue. Count dollars, not logos.

Went investor-heavy in year two with four guys and I'd do it again, with one change.

What kept me alive wasn't diversifying clients, it was diversifying which strategy my clients ran. Flippers go cold when spreads compress. Rental owners keep renovating because a unit sitting empty costs them money either way. I have one buy and hold client who does 8 to 10 turns a year at $14k to $19k each and he is boring and he has never once missed a payment, and he is the reason I could say no to a bad flip scope last fall.

The marketing point in your post is the real tell though, halyard. If you won't market, you can't run a homeowner book, and pretending otherwise for the sake of diversification just means you're understaffed on the thing you're bad at. Go investor, get three clients minimum before you commit, and make one of them a landlord.