Have you ever rehabbed a house before? It can be a way to make a lot of money because you are increasing the value of the house and should get a premium for this. But beware about your choice of what to buy depending on what you have done before.
Experienced
If you are a contractor, electrician or something like that and work on houses anyway you are in pretty good shape. You should be able to estimate how much the job should cost fairly accurately. Your problem is going to be you want to do it all yourself. Remember that time is money. It is quite likely that you will make more money buy having some of the work done by other people you know in the business which will allow you to fix it up faster and sell it faster and get on to the next one.
Inexperienced
If you aren’t a contractor but fairly intelligent, you can learn what you need to know. For the first one you do, find a house that needs minor repairs. You don’t want to learn on a really complex one. Work up to it. You will be glad you did. Otherwise you could completely misjudge, take a bath on the first one and never want anything to do with real estate again.
Also, do you want to have the house inspected? If you don’t know what to look for, that might be a good idea, but if someone else puts in a contract without an inspection clause, you probably won’t get it. You also won’t know how to bid because you won’t know how much repairs are going to be.
How to get around this problem?
Have several contractors come in and bid the job before putting in the offer. You will be amazed because the prices will be quite different most likely. There will be a learning curve and a cost associated with it. Offer to pay the contractors for their time to come in and give you advice as well as a quote.
Get 3 of them and walk through with them and have them tell you what they think the property needs. This will vary as well. Take notes as you walk through. You will learn a lot, especially comparing what the 3 of them say. Based on what they say, figure out what you want done and then tell them what you want them to give a price for. Otherwise, each of their quotes will be for doing different work and you won’t be able to compare them.
Use that to figure out how to put in a bid on the house.