I made £18,000 after selling Homes Under the Hammer house just 4 months after buying it – how I did it
A MUM has revealed how she sold her home, which appeared on Homes Under The Hammer, for an £18,000 profit just four months after buying it.
Nikki, from Crewe, Cheshire, appeared on the BBC show on January 31 and bought the three-bedroom property at auction for £215,000.
The mum-of five initially planned to completely refurbish the whole place.
Her "little sidekick", youngest son Archie, was apparently excited to start "destroying walls" with sledgehammers.
She told the show's presenter Jacqui Joseph that she planned to redo the "out-dated" decor and add an extension to the back and a second one over the garage as a new bedroom.
Nikki's budget for the remodel was £40,000 and it was projected to take six months.
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However, in the end, she decided to put it back on the market with very little work done.
When the Homes Under The Hammer team returned four months later, the only apparent changes were new furniture and new turf in the garden, which had been cleared of clutter.
Now, despite spending just £2,000 on renovating the semi-detached house, she sold it for £235,000.
With the costs taken into account, Nikki raked in a profit of £18,000, partly due to a spike in house prices around that time.
The property-mad mum is an old hand at this sort of project, having been buying and renovating homes since she built her own at 18.
By the time her eldest child was 12, she had already lived in a dozen different houses.
She said she now plans to teach Archie "everything I know" in the hope that he can "take over and carry on what I love".
This particular project, though, had a happy ending as she donated the furniture that she cleared out to a formerly-homeless woman moving into her first flat.
How to buy a house at auction
Like any auction there are risks and rewards with buying houses at auction.
It's a quicker. more flexible way to buy a property than the usual method and you could bag a bargain.
However, if an auction gets competitive you could end up paying over market value.
The two main types of auction are unconditional and conditional auctions.
The former is the more traditional format, where all the buyers come together in a room and make bids in front of one another over the course of a day, or even a few hours.
In the latter, the auction runs for a set time period (like 30 days) and the highest bid at the end of that period wins, like on eBay.
Conditional auctions are the most common for average buyers, rather than investors or developers, as it makes it easier to secure a mortgage before buying the property.
It is always important to do your research before going to an auction.
Make sure to view the house, get all the paperwork checked over by a solicitor and check that you're in a secure financial position first.
You can find The Sun Online's complete guide to property auctions here.