Somebody told me two years in the house makes the profit tax free. True?

A live-in flip is one property: you buy a house that needs work, you live in it as your main home while you fix it, then you sell. What your local contact was pointing at is the federal primary-residence capital-gains exclusion. If you owned the home and used it as your main home for at least two of the five years before the sale, you can exclude a large amount of the gain from tax, up to $250,000 if you file single and $500,000 married filing jointly.

Two things it does not do. It doesn't shield rent you collected, and it doesn't shield wages or any other income. Rent from a basement tenant is its own thing, and renting part of the house you live in also complicates how much of the gain is covered, so that's a conversation with a tax professional before you set it up rather than after.

On the two-of-five wording, the two years don't have to be one continuous stretch, and they don't have to be the two years right before the sale. They have to add up to 24 months of use inside the five years ending on the sale date.

Your renovation money isn't a deduction. It goes into your basis, which is roughly what you paid plus what you spent improving the house. Gain is the sale price, minus selling costs, minus basis. So a new roof lowers your taxable gain by raising basis. Keep every invoice and every card statement in one folder from day one, because basis is what you'll need to prove years later.

The basement tenant part is the bit I'd slow down on. Renting a room while you live there changes the picture and I've seen people find that out at closing.

Run your own numbers before you get attached to the tax angle. Buy at 95, put 45 in, sell at 175. Take off 6 percent of selling costs, call it 10.5, and your gain is about 24.5. The exclusion covers that with 225 to spare. So on your price points the exclusion isn't what makes or breaks the deal, the 175 is. Is there anything in your towns that actually resells at 175, and how many comps are there in the last twelve months? That's the number I'd want.

@ledger has the shape of it right. On a rural low-basis property the exclusion is generous relative to your likely gain, so it stops being the interesting variable and the resale ceiling becomes the whole deal.

What tends to bite in those markets is the appraisal. If the town has four sales a year and two of them were between family, an appraiser has thin material to work with, and a house you've improved past the local top end can appraise below what you spent. That hits your buyer's financing, not just your ego. Before you buy, pull the highest verified sale in that town in the past year and treat it as a soft cap. In roughly a dozen states sale prices aren't public at all, so you may need an agent with MLS access to get real numbers rather than a listing site's guess.

The second thing on rural distressed property is the acquisition loan. Many lenders won't finance a house with no working heat, no functioning kitchen, or an active roof leak, because it fails their habitability standard. So either you bring cash, or you use a renovation mortgage, or you buy something ugly rather than broken. Ask a lender in writing what their minimum property condition is before you make offers.

One more thing on your question about coming back. Time you own the house but don't live in it doesn't erase the exclusion as long as the 24 months of use land in the five-year window, though moving out and renting it can create depreciation you have to reckon with later. That's a tax professional question, and it's worth asking it before you place a tenant.

Question I'd have been too embarrassed to ask in person: where do you sleep while the only bathroom is torn out? Everyone talks about the tax and nobody says how you shower.

@compass I've read about people doing the second bathroom first for exactly that reason, or leaving the tub in and only replacing the vanity until the rest is done. Sequencing seems to be half of it.

So on hollow's numbers you tie up 45k of cash and two years of your life for maybe 25k of gain that would have been mostly untaxed anyway at that size. I came into this thread thinking live-in flip was the obvious starter strategy and now I'm not sure it beats just buying something livable in a town where the resale ceiling is higher. Still chewing on it.