Modern House Flipping Software: 8 Innovative Tools You Need

House flipping isn’t just an opportunity for big real estate companies or home improvement television channels—it’s becoming a reliable source of income for Americans running a solo business or small real estate investment venture. While house flips represented just 5.7% of US home sales in 2017, that number grew to 8.4% by 2022. This trend changes the landscape for real estate investors and house flippers.

• For experienced flippers, there’s more competition in an already tight market.
• For people who want to try house flipping as a new real estate investor, there’s an opportunity in the market.
• Both types of investors can benefit from an increasingly wide segment of the tech sector that has built up to serve house flippers.

As house flipping’s popularity rises, you’ll see new apps and services oriented towards this market. It’s important to routinely explore new software options to see what you can do to automate and streamline your processes, benefit from new advancements, and grow your business. By regularly assessing the digital (and analog) processes you use and considering the benefits new tools have to offer, you can strengthen your operations and remove costly inefficiencies.

Today’s House-Flipping Software Ramps Up Business for Beginner and Experienced Investors

At first glance, house flipping is a very hands-on business, especially if you do most of the work yourself. A lot of the work is tied up in:

• Researching local market trends and finding properties that are a good fit for your strategy
• Inspecting each property to make sure the needed repairs and upgrades won’t overshadow potential profits
• Buying the property
• Doing the repair work yourself or managing contractors who do it for you
• Putting the property on the market and fielding offers

Good flippers prioritize putting well-built properties on the market and won’t cut corners during any of these steps. That can make it feel like you have to do a lot of the work by hand through tried and true processes. However, introducing new technology to your workflow isn’t cutting corners or adding middlemen into the process. Instead, it cuts out inefficiencies and helps you stay competitive with the other house flippers in your area.

Consider the following three ways that modern house-flipping software can help both beginner and experienced flippers.

Streamline Processes

Technology can help remove bottlenecks in your workflow as well as help with tasks that take up a disproportionate amount of time. The right apps will speed up tasks like:

• Searching for homes: Instead of finding potential candidates and doing the math to see if the property is priced right, you can generate smart reports that only show you properties that pass the initial round of calculations.
• Queuing up contractors faster: Instead of shopping around for new contractors for different jobs, you can use apps that tell you which ones are a good fit and who’s available for immediate jobs. You can also bookmark contractors you’ve used before. Even adding instant messaging tools can help you quickly reach out to your preferred specialists and get inspections or services scheduled immediately.
• Managing the closing process: When you’re selling a flip, there’s a lot of paperwork that needs to be handled precisely. Traditionally, a real estate agent would handle it—but if you’re managing it yourself to eliminate the 3% commission, e-signing software and document management tools are a lifesaver.

Maximize Profits

House flipping is ultimately a numbers game. As of 2023, the average gross profit for a flip is $56,000, but the only way to reach or surpass that number is with careful calculations. For example, you might use the 70% rule to determine the viability of a property, especially if you’re new to real estate investment. If you have a lot of experience, you might use tailor-made calculations to weed out bad-fit properties and choose a new investment.

Related: How to Get the Most ROI From Property Investment Software

Today’s house-flipping software can supercharge these efforts. Some apps use real-time market data and historical trends to gauge the likely sales price of a flip while others can estimate the amount of time and money to fix up properties in the first place. With software like this, you can more easily select projects with lower risk.

Minimize Risks

House flipping is full of potential risks that every investor has to navigate. Software can help you juggle those risks by:

• Automating parts of your property selection process so you only see homes that fit your criteria. For example, you can automatically filter results to exclude properties in flood plains, only view properties near schools, or see properties that are listed at 50% of the neighborhood’s average sales price.
• Creating standardized workflows so you never miss a vital step during your due diligence period.
• Assessing the riskiness of buyers’ offers so you’re less likely to have to go back on the market and waste time on bad contracts.

Over time, you can test and combine different apps to make the process as fast, risk averse, and profitable as you want.

8 Essential Tools for House Flippers

Benefits come from using the right software to perform important functions and give you as much control over your investment as possible. Start by looking for these eight types of modern house-flipping software. Shop around for broad solutions that incorporate as many of these areas as possible rather than using eight separate apps.

Tool 1. Smart House-Pricing Calculator

Determining the sales price for a flip is one of the most important strategic elements of flipping properties, and it helps to be able to calculate it before you even buy. Look for smart pricing tools that give you a precise estimate of a home’s sales price. Ideally, it will let you toggle factors like season and improvements so you can plan ahead and decide how much work each property warrants for the maximum ROI.

Tool 2. Buyers’ Real Estate Apps

To grow their flipping businesses, investors always have an eye out for new properties to add to their pipeline. Having the funds for this gets easier as your business gets bigger, but it’s essential to have a clear shopping process. Test out different real estate apps to see which ones give you the best real-time insights, fast access to new properties, and integrations with other software you use.

Related: House Flipping Software Solutions: Revolutionize Your Strategy

Pro Tip: You can also use these apps when planning a sale. See which types of photography, descriptions, and terminology are getting good results among neighboring properties.

Tool 3. Contractor Management Tools

Most flips require a lot of work. They’ll often need more than cosmetic upgrades you feel comfortable handling on your own. As a general rule, a good network includes an inspector, an electrician, a plumber, a handyman, and a foundation inspector whom you trust. Explore different contractor apps to assemble your team. Then, see which apps fit your style for managing invoices, communicating with them for scheduling, and asking for their advice.

Tool 4. Apps for Your Preferred Suppliers and Big Box Stores

Profitable flips include two aspects: increasing revenue and decreasing costs. If you go through a lot of building materials in your flips, you can achieve both aspects by joining loyalty programs and memberships for home improvement stores. Download their apps to score points, get discounts, and reap the benefits so you can trim down costs without lowering the quality of your repairs.

Tool 5. Expense Management App

House-flipping businesses generate several expenses: the house itself, the closing costs, labor, materials, and even utilities. All of these costs come from various avenues, and you may pay them in different ways (such as different credit cards). Find an app that can automatically or intuitively document all of your business expenses. At a minimum, look for an app that organizes expenses for tax time and helps you analyze the costs and ROI for each property.

Tool 6. Flat-Fee MLS Listing Platform

Software can also replace the need to work with a real estate agent. One of the biggest perks of having a realtor is that they can list your property on the MLS, the large database where buyers and agents search for properties. Because listing agents are so expensive, it often wasn’t worth it, and flippers would sell the properties off-market as FSBOs.

With flat-fee MLS listing platforms, you can create your own MLS listing, upload the details and images, and manage queries. It’s faster, self-managed, and a fraction of the cost of hiring an agent. 

Tool 7. Lender App

When you don’t purchase your properties with cash, it’s worth downloading your lender’s app. Then, you can quickly communicate the details of a property, get approved, and manage the closing process. Many lenders have an assortment of resources on their apps, such as closing costs calculators, timelines, and document management sections, that can help you easily handle the buying portion of flipping.

Tool 8. Open House and Showings Management Software

Selling homes to a wide market of prospective buyers requires a strong digital presence. Explore apps and software that can help you manage the process. This might include:

• Flat-fee MLS listing services that can push out the dates of your open house to most consumer-facing real estate sites
• ShowingTime for allowing licensed real estate agents to schedule showings for their clients
• Interior design apps that give you tips about staging, decorating, and consumer expectations

Simplify Your Workflow With Software That Performs Multiple Tasks

All of these software options play a vital and distinct role in today’s house-flipping industry. The more you can use them to save time, trim costs, and avoid bad deals, the better your business will grow. At ListingSpark, we offer many of these functions through our platform. Find smart pricing tools, flat-fee MLS listing services, support for open houses and showings, professional photography, and services from our sister title company, SparkTitle. Contact us today to try our software solutions on your next flip and streamline your investment venture.