Today's television shows about house slipping make the real estate process look as though it's all about decorating, staging, and renovating a fixer upper home. However, traditionally most real estate investors have focused not on rehabilitating a home over the long term, but rather on reselling a property fast. The reason for this is simple. The longer you own the property, the more money you put into it.

This is also one reason why many people enjoy rehab flipping. With this scenario, you never actually own the real estate property, which means that you avoid all the hassle and additional costs of fixing up the property. This type of deal rests on you finding a property that has a lot of potential for profit. Once your offer is accepted, you then resell the property for profit.

In order to make money on rehab house flipping, you need to understand your market and understand the real value of properties. You should be able to quickly evaluate how much money a property will be able to sell for once it is renovated. You'll also need to know how much it costs to complete basic repairs and improvements -- even if you have no interest in making these improvements yourself. You need to understand what a potential buyer or investor in the property will have to pay themselves in order to get the house into good shape.

The second thing you need in order to make money with this sort of real estate opportunity is contacts. Ideally, you want to be in a position where you know many investors you can contact immediately after buying a property they might be interested in. Since you will have deadlines, once you have purchased the property, you want to offload the property really quickly, and generally this means selling to investors you already know have an interest.

You'll also need a good attorney for rehab house flipping. Every contract to sign and every offer you sign will need to include the term "or assigns," or "or my assigns" after your name. This little phrase allows you to assign the contract to another buyer or investor. Without this phrase, you may not be able to offload the property quickly.

Since house flipping can be slightly higher risk -- after all, you're not budgeting on maintaining or keeping the property, so being stuck with it can be a major problem -- you need to have an emergency plan. If you cannot find a buyer, this means that you have to be able and ready to complete the buying transaction yourself. Either that, or you must have an escape clause that allows you to back out of the deal if you cannot find an investor.