I've watched the flip across the ravine cut price three times and rebuild the same fence twice

There's a house across the ravine from me that I've had a clear view of for two years, which is an unfair amount of information about somebody else's deal.

It sold in the fall to somebody who was clearly a flipper, because within eleven days there was a dumpster, a portable toilet, and a crew. Big house. Not the most expensive on that street but in the band where the buyer pool locally is thin enough that I can more or less name the households who could write that check.

The reno looked competent from where I sit. Roof, windows, a full rear deck rebuild, and something structural involving a lot of temporary posts under the great room for about three weeks. Then a stone truck. Then landscaping, which on that lot is not cheap because it's all slope and retaining.

They rebuilt the side fence in cedar. Then, about five months later, they rebuilt it again, different cedar, different cap detail. I have no idea what happened there and it's the detail I'm most curious about.

Listed in late spring. Sat. First cut around week seven, small, the kind of cut that tells you the seller isn't ready to admit anything. Second cut in the fall, bigger. New sign in the winter, different brokerage, and the price came down again with the new agent. It's under contract now, I think, because the sign has one of those riders on it and the landscaping crew stopped coming weekly.

From a hundred yards away it looks like the work was good and the calendar was the enemy. Every month that house sat with the lights on and the lawn cut, somebody was writing checks and getting nothing. I want the boring version of this business and watching that hillside for two years has been an unusually effective argument for it.