Oddbird

What it is

An oddbird is a house that doesn’t match its neighborhood. Wrong architectural style for the block. Wrong finish level for the comps. Irregular lot. Bad adjacencies. A floor plan that doesn’t resemble anything else in the comp set. A house where the street behind it is a different world.

I’ve seen them in a few specific forms. I bought a double-lot property once, planning to build on the vacant side. Cleared the trees. Looked up. Power lines overhead. You can’t build under power lines. I’m an idiot, but I should have walked the property and looked up before I bought it. That extra lot I thought I was getting for free became worthless — not buildable, not sellable at the value I’d assumed. That’s an oddbird issue caught late.

The list of dead-on-arrival factors I watch for: flood zones (unless every house in the neighborhood is in one), major easements running through the property, zoning conflicts, houses built into setbacks or on boundary lines, ceilings under 7.5 feet, and then the catchall — houses that just look different than everything else around them.

Why it matters

Oddbirds break the whole flipping model because the whole model runs on comps. ARV is comps. The buy box is comps. The 70 percent rule is comps. If you can’t comp a property reliably, you can’t price it reliably, which means you can’t underwrite it reliably. You’re guessing. Guessing on a $200,000 purchase with $50,000 in rehab is how flippers go broke.

There’s a specific flavor of oddbird I see a lot: the over-improved house. That’s usually created, not bought. An investor makes it too nice, prices it above anything the neighborhood has ever sold for, and calls it a great deal because of what they put into it. ChatGPT even made this mistake when I tested it — it came back with an ARV of $325,000 for a house in a neighborhood where nothing had sold over $300,000. I call that the gentrification strategy, the HGTV strategy. You make a house so nice that you can sell it for more than anything in the neighborhood has ever sold for. That is not how I operate. I find out what’s actually moving, what’s in the middle of the range of comps, and I build to that.

Rule one: don’t buy an oddbird. Rule two: don’t create one.

How it shows up

The test is simple. Pull up the house. Pull up the five nearest sales. If your subject looks like it belongs in a different movie than the comps, it’s an oddbird. If you have to argue with yourself to find comps, it’s an oddbird. If the comps are a mile away because nothing within half a mile matches, it’s an oddbird.

Why I hate out-of-state investing: I’ll never feel what separates one neighborhood from the next through Google Street View. You drive it, you walk it, you smell it. Presence is everything. This is also why I invest imby.

When a house is off-market cheap, the instinct is to assume it’s a great deal. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the seller has been trying to unload it for two years because every buyer who walked through walked back out. No comps, no deal, no matter the price.

Related

buy box, range of comps, arv, comps, imby, neighborhood, dead on arrival