Saving Our Buyer From a Big Mistake: The Case of the Tricky Flipper

Sept 10, 2025

Join us on a hard-boiled detective story that really happened. We didn’t buy the house, but we lived to win another day…

A New Case Opens

It seemed so exciting.  Our long-term buyer, who had never been able to find anything quite perfect enough, was smitten.  The house was perfect.  It was 50 years old, but was just renovated by an “experienced developer”.  Waterfall stone wrapped the oversized kitchen island.  Ceilings soared.  The kitchen sparkled and the bathrooms radiated confidence.  The pictures looked fantastic and it was better in person.  Gloria visited with the client and they wanted to make an offer and win it.  We were excited.

We downloaded the disclosures and got to work. We often say to our buyers that “we don’t tell you which house to buy, but we might tell you which house NOT to buy.” We did not know it at the time, but this was definitely a story about the latter.

The Pressure Begins

The disclosures were coming in hot.  After the first weekend of broker tours and open houses, many of the key docs were still not ready by Monday afternoon.  They started appearing in waves, but none of them were signed by the seller.  And a roof inspection was still outstanding.  Despite this, the Listing Agent was signaling urgency to take offers mid-week.  This would leave little time to digest the information and review with our client.  We shrugged at the time pressure.  We’ve been through worse.

Clue #1: The Misplaced Checkbox

The first red flag was legalistic.  The Transfer Disclosure Statement (TDS) is where the seller is legally bound to disclose any material fact they know about the property.  Section 1 looks like contractual mumbo-jumbo, and usually it is.  Because usually sellers check the third box (“no substituted disclosures”).  Instead, this seller checked the second box, which says that they are substituting THEIR knowledge with whatever is contained in the “home, termite and roof inspections”

 Why does this matter?  Well, maybe it’s a Listing Agent who did not advise the seller well about how to fill out this often-confusing form.  But this one tiny checkbox invalidates the completeness of the seller-disclosures (the Transfer Disclosure Statement and Seller Property Questionaire).  Hmm.  Innocent mistake, or tricky move?  Not sure yet.

We Tail Our Counterparty (Digitally)

The Seller was an LLC, but the unsigned forms gave us a name.  Like any good sleuth, we hunted the name down until we found our counterparty.  The apparent seller behind the LLC has an Instagram channel where she promotes her book and coaching service about flipping houses.  She claims that she does 20-40 flips per year, always making “six figure profits”.  Hmm.  So we are dealing with a real pro on the other side.  We’d have to be careful.

Clue #2: The Perfect Pest Report

The next unusual doc was a “perfect” pest report.  We’ve built eight brand new houses, and even they don’t have perfect reports.  A good inspector will note “informational items” or things to watch out for in the future, at the least.  There should not be any way that a 50 year old flip has a “perfect” pest report.  A naïve buyer might take comfort in the report, but we jaded agents saw shenanigans.

Clue #3: The Curiously Circumspect Property Inspector

The property report was from an inspector with, shall we say, a “light touch”, and was similarly quite positive and not very curious.  They way certain things were phrased made us think that the investigator was not looking to conduct a very thorough investigation.  And having read hundreds of these things over the years, the skimpy 11-page size of the report raised our eyebrows.

One suspicious fact was that the house had a vintage “stab-lok” main electrical panel.  The seller replaced an electrical sub-panel, but did not bother to fix this.  Why not?  The stab-lok was a widely used, but now universally considered unsafe, electrical service panel.  And there was only 100 Amps in that old clunker.  200 AMPs would be much more appropriate for our modern age… but in this neighborhood all the electrical lines are undergrounded.  We recently upgraded a house from 100 amps to 200 for $8,000.  Upgrading from 100 to 200 when undergrounded might cost tens of thousands for the trenching alone.  OK, maybe the flipper cheaped out on upgrading the lines, which we’d advise our buyer to do if we got the house.  But why did they not replace this obviously unsafe old panel?  The property inspector used circumspect phases, but this issue was serious.  Our moral sense would not have allowed us to sell a house like this after doing six months of flipping work but leaving this obvious safety hazard.  We began to suspect our counterparty of being not just a flipper, but a Tricky Flipper.

Despite our Spidey-sense tingling, all the seller disclosures, and the pest and property inspections seemed otherwise… not awful.  They were far more superficial than we would want, but there was nothing super-bad in them.  There was also an impressively long list of “work done” to the house.

The Case Breaks Wide Open

The last file in the disclosure packet, “Item 26 - Historical Disclosures”, started off dull as dust.  “Why bother to read the *old* set of documents that the seller received when buying the house?  Isn’t everything in there superseded by the recent disclosures?” you might ask.  Well, maybe.  But not in this case, dear readers. This is where the case cracked wide open like a window when the truth finally throws a brick.

The historical disclosures started annoyingly dull, with old versions of Natural Hazard Disclosure Reports and Prelims, which should not be included.  These ARE legitimately superseded by newer reports.  Some agents would say “nothing to see here” and stop reading.  Heck, some agents barely read disclosures at all!  But we are not those kind of agents.

The Surprisingly Worried Previous Listing Agent

After all this needless fluff and a third cup of coffee, the bombshells started dropping.  We noted that the previous listing agent was over-disclosing, and repeating many times, that the house was a “fixer-upper that needs a lot of repairs”. His AVID (“Agent Visual Inspection Disclosure” noted “stains and mold” in one of the bedrooms.  Yikes! “Mold” is one of those hot-button words to Realtors.  We didn’t read anything about mold remediation in the “list of work done” by the current seller. 

The Nightmare Unfolds

The old Property inspection report was a horror show.  “Evidence of water damage.”  “Leakage through the roof covering.”  “Portions of the stucco backing show signs of water intrusion.”  “Improper wiring methods.”  “Disconnected vent pipes.”  “It is recommended that the source of these stains be identified and corrected.”  None of this was on the list of work done.

We really do not want to see water intrusion on interior walls and ceilings, but this is what the old inspector reported.  Drywall does not handle being wet very elegantly; it should be replaced, not just covered up.  

Did the Seller strip the house down to the studs and removed any mold or fungus on the framing?  If they did, they did not say so.  They apparently covered it all up with fresh materials and paint, and ignored these huge defects.

And then the roof section. 

Well, at least we found where all those water stains were coming from. Everything about the roof was bad.   Based on these historical reports and county records, we supposed the previous seller to be an elderly person who just ran the house into the ground for his decades of ownership.  Water might have been coming into the inside of this structure for a decade, based on how dilapidated the roof was.

The New Roof Report Arrives

Was the roof replaced in the flip?  Nope!  But the new pictures of the roof looked great.  But as the newly arrived roof inspection report would say, the roof is “approximately 1> years old”. 

What the heck does “1>” mean? 

That inspector must have flunked out of math like a busted calculator at a pawn shop.

It does not even make sense.  “<1” would mean less than one, basically new.  Was this inspector trying to suggest something the opposite of what it was? Or just really uneducated at math?  The photos in the report looked mostly like a new roof. Scanning over this quickly, one might not even notice the issue.

Well  “Finding 3” diplomatically says that new shingles were installed on top of the old roof – the one that is leaking like a sieve.  An included photo makes more sense in context:  that is a green-gloved hand lifting up what you think to be a complete new grey roof to expose the bad old brown roof:

 Instead of saying that this roof will probably leak again soon, they mention “substandard flashings” (this is not a nit-picky point; it’s a big problem) and “there does not appear to be any immediate leak concerns on the roof.”  Well of course.  It was a sunny day.  The Tricky Flipper has accomplices in the roof inspection business, it seems.

The Problematic Previous Pest Report

Oh, and the previous pest report?

That’s a lot of problems!  The list of work done was silent about all the sills, jambs, fungus, dry rot and pre-existing problems. Did the new inspector just miss it all, or was tens of thousands of dollars of work done that they forgot to claim credit for? As developers ourselves, we view that list of work done as our biggest marketing asset; it would be hard to forget.

Saving Our Client

We called our client up as soon as we had read it all through.  We’d been scheduled to review the disclosures the next day, but when things are so awful, we wanted to save their time in reading through this nastiness.  I mean it does take hours, and that’s when you are hard-boiled detectives like us. 

Their reaction when we popped the bubble of the perfect-seeming new home?  “Thank you so much for saving me from making a horrible mistake!”

In many cases, we’ll quiz the listing agent and get answers from the seller.  But these disclosures were so damning, and our understanding of the Tricky Flipper’s methods, made us not even try.  This house was a beautiful fashion model who has a terminal disease.  Beautiful, but deadly to your bank account, if not your health.

The Tricky Flipper: An innocent businesswoman?

The Tricky Flipper did not “technically” do anything deceptive.  By checking the second box in Section 1 of the TDS, and by having various boilerplate warnings for a buyer to conduct their own disclosures, and by the disclaimers in the inspection reports, she would probably survive any legal challenges. The forms allow a Seller to do exactly what she did.

The value we bring as agents is that we can see a greater story in the omissions. We know enough about home construction to understand the costs to the developer. We know the ins and outs of how the contracts work. We know the language that property inspectors use, and what seemingly bland statements often mean. We are zealous at protecting our clients in what is often their biggest financial investment. We can help quantify the costs and the risks for various situations, so our buyer clients can make the best decision.

An unrepresented buyer, or a buyer with a discount agent, or just a bad agent could easily get duped by the Tricky Flipper.  She is still at large, and getting richer every day. 

We Live to Win Another Day

So we walked away from this one.  But someone will buy that house.  And probably someone will be very upset when they realize what they have really bought.  But it won’t be our client! 

Our client will be in a house that is beautiful inside and out, with joy, financial appreciation, and peace of mind.  We are happy to have shed a tiny bit of light on what can be a dark and treacherous housing market for the unaware. We lived to win another day.

Your Detectives