Flipping a house is a lot of work, and can yield a big profit. But not every project is guaranteed to be lucrative. So what’s the key to successfully making over a fixer-upper and selling it for a gain? Our new series “What the Flip?” presents before and after photos to identify the smart construction and design decisions that ultimately helped make a house desirable to buyers.

The flippers who found this four-bedroom, four-bathroom home in the seaside town of Carlsbad, CA, seemed to have a good idea of the potential financial risks involved in their venture—and how to avoid them.

They picked up their property, a modest 60-year-old home, in May 2019 for $1.06 million. As the following photos show, they demolished the place, started from scratch, and built it up into a modern farmhouse mansion that feels right at home in the beachy locale.

But did their hard work pay off? You betcha! They sold it just over a year later, in June 2020, for $2.3 million, nearly doubling their investment.

So what exactly did they do that caused the home’s value to increase so much? We asked our team of experts to weigh in on the changes that made the most impact.

Front exterior

We wouldn’t blame you for thinking that these before and after pictures are of different homes. At first glance, we did too!

“I had to check the address numbers to be sure,” admits Marcia Castro-Socas, a real estate broker and experienced home flipper. She says the changes to the front exterior were not a small job.

“The reconfiguration of the entry is a large project, as the roofline is involved, but it is spectacular and changes the look of everything,” she says.