WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A HOUSE PROJECT

The pair have honed what to look for in a potential project. For Christina, it’s about having a buyer in mind (family, professional couple, retirees etc), making sure they can create the perfect home for them from that house – and then being certain they can make it beautiful.

“We might shuffle rooms around for better flow for a family or make it fully fenced for kids. Then, I’ll look for features, to see where we can freshen it up and bring the character out,” she says.

“When you look at a house, ask yourself where can I add value?” Tyge says. “I check to see if the kitchen and bathrooms need upgrading, whether we can open it up to create open-plan living, whether we can create indoor-outdoor flow and a deck. I’ll check the condition of the property as a whole and the condition of the paint on the outside. Materials-wise, you can’t go wrong with weatherboard, solid brick or block. You want to add a bedroom or home office where possible; a lot of old houses have their own laundry room, which you don’t need so we’ll try to create a new room. Look for three-plus bedrooms or two bedrooms that can become three.”

And the deterrents? Potentially troublesome exteriors such as plaster, internal gutters, fibrolite and anything that will require building consent.

“We stay away from anything like that because we’re trying to do a quick turnaround. Load-bearing walls, decks over 1.5m high, extensions, moving a kitchen from one side of the house to the other. For us, it’s important that we create like from like and work within the framework,” he explains.

They say there are two keys to success in flipping: being good at forward-planning and being decisive.

“We make decisions in half an hour that might take someone weeks or months,” says Christina. “We’re both decisive and are known for our 15-minute meetings. For this house, the flooring conversation was 10 minutes. If you take the time to pre-plan, and know what you want, you can make the decision faster once you have the samples,” she says.

Once a house is settled on, Christina will buy all the appliances so the subbies have all the information and specs they need when they come to do their job. This pre-planning is the difference between a job taking six weeks or three months. Their kitchens, for example, take three weeks instead of months.