At a Glance
2 completed flips, both exited clean
£67,100 combined net profit, verified
Mitchell Crescent: bought £77k, sold £215k, profit £31,300
Lilian Grove: bought £99k, sold £225k, profit £35,800
Knoll Avenue: live project, bought £160k, GDV £375k–£410k
All projects sourced at auction in South Wales
CF47 9JF · 3-Bed → converted to 4-Bed Semi-Detached
Our first auction purchase. A probate property that on the surface looked manageable — until we discovered undisclosed fire damage so severe the fire service had previously attended and the entire roof structure needed a full rebuild. None of this was declared by the auction house prior to completion and added delays to the work schedule.
We did not walk away. We rebuilt the garage as a side extension, moved the bathroom downstairs, and converted from 3 to 4 bedrooms. Delivered and sold for £215,000. In 9 months. Around full-time jobs and two young children.
On paper, the deal was clean: £77,000 to buy, a £65,000 refurbishment, and a £190,000 end value. A neglected probate home in Merthyr Tydfil — the kind of property where the bones look sound and the work looks cosmetic. Lindsey viewed it, we ran the numbers, and they worked. We bid, and we won.
The first day we held the keys, we had a structural surveyor walk the property — the earliest we could get anyone in after completion. The news was not what we'd planned for. Charred timbers ran throughout the loft; the fire service had attended a blaze at the property in the past, and the entire roof structure needed replacing before any other work could safely begin. None of it had been declared.
We won't pretend that moment was easy. Standing in that loft we were disheartened and frankly angry — photographing every charred beam to send straight back to the auction house and our solicitor. We had completed on a property with a serious problem nobody had disclosed.
Walking away wasn't an option — we already owned it. So rather than cut our losses, we built a plan that turned the setback into an opportunity. Instead of simply replacing the roof and restoring three bedrooms, we would rebuild the garage as a side extension, move the bathroom downstairs as is common across the valleys, and add a fourth bedroom upstairs. More spend — but a meaningfully higher end value to match. The refurbishment grew from £65,000 to £88,000, and the target moved beyond £210,000.
Building control became closely involved — groundwork, the rebuild, window replacements, and a list of requirements to reach sign-off. The hardest stretch was the roof itself: with no roofer yet contracted, we had to source, quote, vet and deploy one in the middle of their busiest season, which became our single biggest delay. Poor weather in an exposed, elevated spot didn't help, particularly with external landscaping running alongside.
Day to day it looked like most of our deals do — calls with our builder, WhatsApp updates at all hours, site visits squeezed around work and bedtime, hours of research into the local market, and steady conversations with neighbours to keep everyone onside while we worked around them. All of it around two full-time jobs and two young children.
Nine months from purchase to sale. Marketed at £219,000, with an offer of £215,000 accepted — ahead of even our revised target — for a net profit of £31,300 on our very first auction project.
Due diligence is everything. No nook, no cranny — and certainly no loft — goes unchecked before we progress a deal again. Auctions are supposed to be fully transparent; they are not always, and we no longer take any statement at face value. It was a hard first lesson, but it is the reason the two projects that followed ran the way they should.
| Purchase price | £77,000 |
| Auction fees | £1,850 |
| Land Transaction Tax | £3,850 |
| Solicitors (purchase & sale) | £2,000 |
| Bridging finance | £8,000 |
| Refurbishment | £88,000 |
| Estate agent fee | £3,000 |
| Sale price | £215,000 |
| Net profit | £31,300 |
NP23 5LY · 3-Bed Semi-Detached
A tight street with real potential, damp issues, leaking chimney stack removed in collaboration with local housing association — particularly the opportunity to create off-road parking. Known challenges included significant bamboo to the rear of the garden.
Works included full kitchen diner knock through, the addition of a downstairs WC, off-road parking, garden levelling, chimney removal and full exterior render. Acquired early, but delayed while awaiting funds to refurb. Cleaner deal overall than Project 1 and delivered more efficiently.
We liked this one from the first viewing — and the area told its own story. Houses were selling fast, and neighbours chatting on the street during our visit confirmed the demand. We bid at auction but pulled out at £112,000 when it climbed beyond where the numbers made sense for us; it sold to another bidder at £120,000. Then came the call: that sale had fallen through over the buyer's finances, and as one of the final bidders we were offered the property directly. We opened at £95,000 and settled at £99,000 — comfortably less than we'd been willing to pay in the room. Discipline at auction had quietly paid off.
We acquired early and the house sat dormant from September through December while we arranged refurbishment funds. Rather than let that time go to waste, we used it — working through most of the rip-out ourselves, room by room, with the waste stacked and ready to go in one room. Even while carrying the cost of bridging finance, doing that labour ourselves made real savings before the refurbishment proper had even begun.
The property shared a semi-detached wall with a housing-association home next door, and there was damp tied to a leaking roof and chimney stack on the shared structure. The tenants told us they'd lived with the leak for a long time; the previous owner had never been willing to get involved. We took a different view. We carried out the work on the association's behalf and split the cost down the middle — a genuine win/win that solved our damp problem, fixed theirs, and left good relations with the neighbours on the other side of the wall.
This was a tight street with not enough parking, so creating off-road parking was a real value driver. We took out half the front turf and built a parking area on a proper Type 1 sub-base topped with stone — a clean, durable finish at a fraction of the cost of block paving or tarmac, and a feature buyers actively search for. To the rear, a significant stretch of bamboo had spread toward the neighbouring garden; we dealt with it aggressively, clearing and treating the ground thoroughly — hopefully never to return.
Inside, the value-adds were the familiar moves of modernising for how families live today: a kitchen-diner knock-through and a new downstairs WC, alongside garden levelling, the chimney removal, and a full exterior render. The refurbishment began just after New Year and was completed in around eleven weeks. The only real friction was good-natured — a few discussions over wall positioning and worktop fitting — all resolved positively as the work progressed.
We brought it to market at £225,000. Within the first two days we had two viewing requests; both viewed, and both offered £215,000, which we rejected. Days later a full asking-price offer arrived and we accepted, glad to move on to the next with another clean completion behind us — a net profit of £35,800.
Mitchell could have been a lucky finish — a one-off. Lilian was the confirmation we needed: proof we could do this, and do it well. We were more settled this time, surer of our finishes and colours throughout, especially in the kitchen and bathroom. This was the project where the model stopped feeling like a gamble and started feeling like a system.
| Purchase price | £99,000 |
| Auction fees | £2,250 |
| Land Transaction Tax | £4,950 |
| Solicitors (purchase & sale) | £2,000 |
| Bridging finance | £10,000 |
| Refurbishment | £68,000 |
| Estate agent fee | £3,000 |
| Sale price | £225,000 |
| Net profit | £35,800 |
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