Buy, live, renovate, sell: Edina house with saltwater pool listed at $2.95M

Andrea Vorachek said she and her husband, Kyle, weren’t really planning to move when they came across a 1951 California Modern house in Edina.

But the “live-in flippers” — who buy homes in promising neighborhoods and live in them while renovating before selling for a profit — were looking for another project and decided to at least take a look.

“We immediately fell in love with the lot, location and property,” said Kyle Vorachek, a general contractor.

They moved into the house in 2021 and undertook “a massive remodel and update,” per Andrea Vorachek, who is a real estate agent.

“We basically gutted everything and built it back up,” she said of the house, which had attractive clean and sharp lines on the exterior but felt chilly inside thanks to all the white walls and floors. “We wanted it to feel really warm and homey.”

Four years later, their job is done, and they’ve put the house back on the market with a $2.95 million price tag.

The Voracheks have live-and-flipped homes in the Tangletown and Lynnhurst neighborhoods of Minneapolis as well as in Evergreen, Colo. That strategy lets the couple experience what it’s like to live in the space day to day, which Andrea Vorachek said “led to more thoughtful updates, better functionality and a result that feels both high-end and highly livable.”

The 6,640-square-foot Edina house has five bedrooms and six bathrooms. It features a billiard room, wet bar, conservatory, amusement room, office, library and several other spaces without designated purposes.

That’s actually fewer rooms from the original layout. The two have a photo of Kyle Vorachek standing amid rubble and holding a sledge hammer, in the middle of tearing down walls.

Another major change was moving the too-small kitchen to the back of the house and adding a butler’s pantry. There, the kitchen can open onto the patio.

The discomforts of living in a home while it’s undergoing extensive renovation is one of the biggest obstacles to a live-in flip, said Nick Sundahl, an agent with Lakes Sotheby International Realty’s Wayzata office.

“You need that extra bathroom to use, and what are you going to use as a kitchen? Do you have a hot plate or portable induction stove?” said Sundahl, who offers guidance for navigating the local real estate market on his YouTube channel, “Minneapolis Living.”

Homes with fully equipped extra living spaces, such as mother-in-law apartments, are the best candidates, Sundahl said. The lower level of the Edina house provided a living room and full kitchen, relatively comfortable quarters for the Voracheks and their now-3-year-old son during renovations.

Sundahl also emphasized the importance of market expectations, especially those specific to the surrounding neighborhood. That means avoiding high-end upgrades that greatly exceed the value of nearby properties.

A live-in flip also offers some financial incentives. The future sellers save on paying for their own residence, and as long as they live in the house for two of the past five years, Sundahl said, they can enjoy some tax breaks. Without living in it, the home would be an investment property subject to higher taxes. Investment buyers also have to make down payments of 20% vs. 5% or 10% for occupants.

The Voracheks paid $1.65 million for the house in 2021. The remodeling work would be around $1.1 million retail, Kyle Vorachek said, but they were able to save because he applied his professional skills to the project. Do-it-yourselfers without those skills are “buying a big responsibility financially at the time” that might not fully pay off, per Sundahl.

Live-in flippers also have more time to make design decisions and purchases, Sundahl said. That meshed with the Voracheks’ philosophy of prioritizing quality rather than speed.

“We weren’t flipping for a quick return,” Andrea Vorachek said. “We were redesigning for the way people really live.”

With their renovations, the Voracheks sought to make the home visually interesting, partly through the use of unusual finishes, like heated herringbone white-oak floors on the upper level, sandstone-colored travertine in the kitchen and shiny blue walls in the butler’s pantry.

Outside the solarium, Kyle Vorachek’s “favorite spot to have a glass of wine in the evening,” is a saltwater pool, something more common in fitness centers, hotels or spas.

“We wanted our house to feel like something that you would not normally see in Minnesota,“ Andrea Vorachek said. ”We love to travel. We love to collect experiences and fun things to have in our home."

Andrea Vorachek of the Reside team brokered by Keller Williams Realty Integrity Edina (612-716-7621, andrea@livereside.com), has the $2,950,000 listing.