We have, on occasion, allowed neighbors and friends of neighbors to tour our renovation project as it is in process. This can help you by spreading the word around for potential buyers and by gaining good will in the neighborhood. One byproduct of this can be that you will have folks who want to buy the home before you are finished.

We started down this road once, and it seemed like a reasonable opportunity for both the buyer and us. The potential buyer wanted to save some money by purchasing the property and finishing it himself. And we were open to the idea of cashing out quicker, as long as we could still turn a reasonable profit. We did a market analysis and figured out a potential selling price if the house was finished, figured out what was left to do, how much more money we would have had to spend to finish, and how much of that savings we were willing to pass along to the buyer. This seemed reasonable enough.

But there were several problems. First, it is nearly impossible to...