Some of my buyers are running in the opposite direction from what are known as "flips," while many of my buyers are only interested in seeing these homes. A flip in Los Angeles generally means a home that has been purchased within the last 3-6 months and renovated to within an inch of their lives! They are tight on space, but so charming that most buyers are willing to overlook the square footage issue. And the folks on the designing end of the best ones are hitting every note and they are drop dead gorgeous! They are practically brand new homes, but they're actually facelifts on top of a 1920's - 1940's foundation. Some of the best companies out there are doing top quality work, where as a few of them appear as if they ran out of money and had to start cutting corners. The smart ones stage these flips and they look like the love child of Ikea and West Elm. These homes look and feel like high end, expensively decorated homes on the west side of LA. They are very seductive.
The renovators doing these projects have got to "buy them right" in order to be able to put enough money into them so that they are done right. And by that I mean they've got to steal them...as this is the only way that they can budget so as to not scrimp, so they can really "cherry out" the remodeling, so that they sell in 10 minutes at a low price, and the investors get their money back and move on to the next one. Get in, get out. But make them gorgeous and price 'em low so that they move fast. It's a winning formula and so far it's working.
The remodeled homes I've been showing lately are on the edges of the areas where the hipsters want to live on the east side of LA. Echo Park is hip and the "hipster adjacent" to this is Elysian Valley (i.e., Frogtown). Mount Washington is gorgeous up at the top, and the "hipster adjacent area here is Cypress, or El Sereno. Highland Park is on the verge of being hip...so the whole area is hipster adjacent!
The price you pay for a cherried out, 2-3BR, 1-2 bath, 1000sqft - 1400sqft, beautiful home in LA, at an inexpensive cost of $385k-$499k, is that you have to live in a somewhat dicey area. But, it's probably only a matter of time before these areas become the new hipster area. Have you been noticing all of those new yoga studios opening up in Highland Park?!
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