BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 173: Flipping 100+ Houses in an Expensive, Competitive Market with Steve Jones

Episode Date: May 5, 2016

House flipping can be incredibly profitable and fun — but for many people, trying to make it work is next to impossible because of the high cost of homes. That’s why on this episode we’re excited to chat with Steve Jones, a house flipper from Southern California who has flipped over 100 deals in his neighborhood. Steve’s advice is rock solid for anyone looking to grow their real estate business — and you are going to love his advice about open houses. Steve’s perspectives just might change how you do real estate forever. In This Episode We Cover: Thoughts on investing in Southern California How Steve got started in real estate The first home he flipped What exactly a “condo conversion” is How he’s done over 100 flips so far How Steve finds his deals What you should know about looking for hidden value Steve’s formula for evaluating a deal How he flips a deal What he typical spends on a normal rehab The worst flip he’s ever done How to think with the buyers in mind Tips for getting an A-team contractor How to learn from contractors The importance of developing a thorough scope of work Why deals are relationship based How to calculate land value What happens when people lose their money Things that he loves about flipping houses The “slow flip” Becoming an expert on your neighborhood And SO much more! Links from the Show Fake F***ing Flowers (video) BiggerPockets Calculators Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhil Tweetable Topics: “We always bring the indoors outdoors — and bring the outdoors in.” (Tweet This!) “You have to have an appetite for risk.” (Tweet This!) “Your best price is always going to be your first price.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Steve Steve’s BiggerPockets Profile Steve’s Company Website Steve’s Instagram Steve’s Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 173. How good your flips come out. A lot of it is predicated on how often you show up. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody?

This is Josh Dorkin. I'm the Baker Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's up? What's up, man? I'm sore. I've never been so sore in my entire life. Keep your private life. No, I was playing racquetball this morning.

I haven't done that in a long time. I've played three games this week, and before this week, I haven't played in years. Isn't that what you used back when you were a chubby little kid to get spinning? That's exactly. I lost like 60 pounds back when I was 21 for my wedding. So, you know, getting ready for summer. You know, got to look good for all the ladies. Going to pop you up.

That's cool. Of course, ironic that I call you a little kid, you know, being nine feet tall. I am nine feet tall, actually, nine 12. So, you know. That's excellent. How are things? Oh, besides being sore, things are really good. You know, it's been a big week, big couple weeks here, bigger pockets.

You know, sites massively growing very, very fast. We passed the 500,000. We talked about last week. Five hundred thousand. And you guys made a video there in the Denver office. We did. We did. We made a little promo, a little commercial.

You could check it out, by the way, on our show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 173. Yeah, it's cool. It's a fun little little promo piece. It makes me crack up every time I watch it. It's a little bit blue, but, you know, if you don't mind. A little inappropriate. Just a, you know, it's bleeped out, but it's a little inappropriate. It's edgy.

It's edgy. Yeah, you know, we're bigger pockets. But, you know, I think it's designed for those people. really, who are working in these jobs that they hate and, you know, just dreaming about something else. And so, well, check it out if you haven't seen it already. Again, go to the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 173. That's show 173. And if you like it, please share it. You know, obviously, we'd love to get it out to more people and inspire more people to check out Bigger Pockets. Yeah, that's been fun. And, you know, I think we're about to hit like

50,000 Facebook likes and 200,000. forum posts, two million, I'm sorry, two million forum posts on the site. So yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. But today, we've got an amazing show. You know, I know we say that a lot, but a lot of amazing shows. So, you know, it's awesome. But before we talk about it, why don't we get to today's quick tip? All right. So today's quick tip is if you are familiar with the Bigger Pockets rental property calculator, it's something that I use almost every single day. And a lot of our members use, thousands of people use it all the time. Well, we just added a feature to it, and I wanted to just talk about it for a second. Basically, you know, what I do in my investing

is I like to buy properties. I like to fix them up and I like to rent them out, and then I'll sell them later on. And so before, we didn't have a way of really calculating what that meant in the long run in terms of return on investment. So what we did is we added a total return option. And it's on the bottom of like the chart that's on page four of the calculator. So let's say I bought a property for $50,000 or $500,000, whatever doesn't matter, and put some money into it, fixed it up, rent it out for five years and then sold it. What kind of total return would I get? It gives you a much more accurate view of your investing strategies. Anyway, check it out if you have not yet. Free members can use it, I think five times. Pro members can use it unlimited. But check it out very, very cool.

You can kind of see what your total return is going to look like versus just cash on cash. And that biggerpockets.com.com slash calc or slash analysis if you want to learn more about it. So there you go. There we go. Cool. All right. Today's guest is Steve Jones. Steve is a real estate investor from the Southern California area. And I think it's really important that we talk to Steve because he's actually flipping in that area. And I think it's important because we hear all the time from people, Southern California, I can't invest there. I'm a real estate investor who lives there. It doesn't make sense.

Or I'm in New York and it doesn't make sense. Or I'm in San Francisco, Chicago, any of the big expensive markets. And so Steve is actually flipping houses. He's flipped over 100 houses in the Southern California area. And not only that, but he's flipping houses that he's buying probably pretty close to market. And he's making a profit on it. So it's a fascinating strategy, how he does it, how he actually goes about making money. And I think he shoots in the eye the idea that you have to go somewhere else and invest outside of your market.

It can be done. You just have to think about it. You have to be smart about it. Yeah, it's a great show. I'm really excited. and looking forward to presenting it to you. Here's why savvy real estate investors are obsessed with bonus depreciation. It lets you take that rental property or commercial building you own

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condo conversions, and we dig in a little bit on that. It's another interesting strategy. So listen up, Stay tuned and bust out those no pads, guys. We got lots of great juicy tips for you. So with that, all right, Steve, welcome to the show, man. It's good to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Super, super excited to be here. Yeah, we should have fun today because we're talking about something that maybe, you know,

a lot of times we get people that are in the, you know, Seattle market, because I have a lot of, you know, friends up here that we've on the show. We've had people in the Midwest quite a bit. But I'm excited to talk to you about Southern California a little bit today because that's where you invest. Is that right? Yes, Southern California. All right.

primarily Los Angeles and Orange County. Okay, because everyone says can't be done. I hear that all the time. Can't be done in Southern California. In fact, every webinar I do, somebody says, yeah, sure, that works up where you live, but it'll never work in Southern California. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Good.

Yeah, I'm excited. Cool. All right. And of course, for people listening, it doesn't mean just Southern California, but if you live in an expensive market, a very hot market, if you live in any of the major cities in the U.S., you guys are going to love this show. So let's do it. How did you, Steve, how did you get started with Revenue?

real estate. I got started with real. I'm going to back up a little bit. Sure. So I worked in the action sports industry, which is sort of like the surf industry for over 25 years. And most of that time was spent at Quicksilver. You're familiar with that brand? I wear their t-shirts, but that's about it. It's because he's 12. So that whole industry is based in Orange County. I was living down in Orange County, working at Quicksilver, and I started buying a couple of homes down. And I was living in Laguna Beach at the time. And I bought my, gosh, the first home that I bought down in Laguna, I paid $140,000 for it. Wow. Oh, my God. So that tells you kind of how long ago that was. And I remember when I bought that, I was like, oh, my gosh, you know, how am I going to make the

mortgage? And this is, you know, every, any time you buy something like that, it's always like, how am I going to do this? And then I, so working at Quicksilver, and then I bought a couple of properties, and I flipped one. And I just, I didn't even know what I was doing. And I made money on it. And again, this was in Laguna Beach. And then fast forward to sort of the end, closer to the end of my career at Quicksilver, I was introduced to a friend of mine by a mutual friend. He had a 12 unit apartment community, little rental community in the city of Costa Mesa, and he was kind of wondering what to do with it. I partnered with him, and we did a condo conversion, a 12-unit condo conversion in the city of Costa Mesa, and that really started my real estate career. So for those who don't

know what a condo conversion is, can you explain that real quick? Yeah. So in this case, like I said, it was, it was really a series of six duplexes. And this kind of little sort of again, rental community, and they were rental units. And so what we did is we purchased this piece of property, went through the city of Costa Mesa, and what you do is you basically sort of untie each unit where you can sell each unit individually. Got it, got it. Really quickly, because knowing that you've done the condo conversions, Brandon and I talked up front, we definitively want to dig in a little deeper.

I want to rewind before we get there, if that's okay, for everybody and if it's not. It's your show. What are you going to do about? So that property you paid 140K for, the original property, do you still own that? I sold it.

Just curious. What is that worth today? That is worth 850. 850? Yeah, a little less than a million. Okay, fair enough. And you're talking about

just randomly buying property and flipping it? I mean, did you have any experience or was it like, you know, hey, you know, this makes sense. I could fix up a property and do it. How did that all kind of come about? It was crazy. So, again, the first one that I did, I just, I did not know, I did not know anything

about anything. And I was just stumbling through the thing, totally blind. I didn't have, again, I had a full-time job. And I didn't, I just didn't know what I was doing. And I think the market kind of helped me a little bit, sort of carried me up. And it was one of those things. I bought it. I held on it for a little bit.

and I sold it. And I think I made, and I made 40 grand off of it. And this light bulb went off and I was like, wow, like I could like there's a potential to do this. Yeah. Were you living in the property at all or you just bought it? No, no, no, not living in the property. Yeah. Okay. Cool. And so I know you've been flipping properties for a while. So just, you know, so we can get some context. How many flips have you actually done so far? I've done over 100 flips. Wow. And were those all in the, they're all in the Southern California, Orange County, L.A. area. Yeah, I started, I was working down in Orange County. My partner, my business partner and I down there, we did the two, we actually did two

condo conversions down in Orange County. And the last one that we did, the second one that we did, we released it in, I think, 2007. And so for anyone that's familiar with timing. Best time. Yeah, it was just, it was it. We did this condo conversion. and the project came out great.

It was this beautiful thing. And we released it at the top of the market. And it was just like crickets. And so that thing, you know, then the economy did what the economy did. I was living up in Los Angeles by that time. And then I was sort of looking around and I wasn't working at Quicksilver. And I was like, gosh, what am I going to do? And so then I started looking at areas up here in L.A.

And I started looking at flipping houses. and then that's sort of where I found my niche and went into, so for people that aren't super familiar with Los Angeles, you've got kind of like the West Side and you have sort of like the East Side. And so most of my business is on the East Side. It goes east side of Los Angeles. Got it. Okay. So you've given me a whole lot of material here and I know we want to dig in a little bit more. So 100 flips is not inconsequential. So obviously you've figured it out. I've learned a few things along the way. Cool. So let's just start with the obvious. How does one flip a property in Los Angeles? How does one do deals in a really expensive market? I mean, you said you have a business partner. I mean, are you guys kind of co-financing it? Or is, you know, is it like any other market, just a little more expensive? What's the story there?

I think, yeah, I think a lot of it is, gosh, flipping a home in Los Angeles is just like flipping a home really sort of anything else, like anywhere else. And the thing that I tell people all the time is, gosh, to redo a bathroom costs about the same amount in Los Angeles as it does really anywhere else. So you have a lot of these things that are really sort of the same. Now, the purchase price, you know, on the buy-in, it might be a little bit higher than what a lot of people are used to. And just like everywhere else, I'm sure, the competition around here is insane. I mean, you have people bidding on these properties and, you know, this one that I looked at the other day, they got 27 offers. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. So how do you do that? I mean, you know, being that it is an ultra competitive market, are you finding your deals on market? Are you finding off market deals? What's your strategy for actually getting these properties? Yeah.

So it's a combination of both of those. Sometimes I've got, you know, I've been doing this for a while in L.A. and I have a little bit of a reputation and people know me. And so I've been fed deals in the past. And anytime somebody cold calls me or gives me whatever, I follow up on every single lead. Having said that, most of the deals that I've gotten have been, we've just peeled them off of the MLS.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. And then, like, so much of this industry and so much of this business is just relationship-based. And so then, even with Los Angeles, where it's as big of a city as it is, it's really like the real estate world

can get kind of small. And so then one of the advantages that we have, and when I say we, I mean, my real estate agent and I, is we've got this track record and we can perform, and the person that has the listing wants to make sure that whoever's going to do the deal is going to close. Right.

Here's my question. If you're pulling these things off the MLS, I was an agent now, I know the market pretty well. That's not a market where properties are going for undermarket. There's maybe some little pockets, but overall, it's going to be really hard to find something on the MLS in Laguna or West Hollywood or Costa Mesa that's going to be under market. So how do you go about acquiring these deals at a point where you can actually make a profit on them? What are you doing to transform these things where you're going to actually walk away with some value and profit? Yeah. So the thing that I – the thing that I'm always looking for, you're absolutely right, everything you said.

And the thing that I'm looking for is I'm looking for – Sure. Looking for what? Hidden value. Hidden value. Okay. What does that mean? Yeah, what does that mean?

And so hidden value is – so these homes that – most of these homes that I'm picking up, they're older homes, built in the 20s and the 30s. By the time I get them, they've just been, you know, kind of beat down or whatever. And so for me, what I look for is I look at the thing, sort of take a step back, and look to see what I can do to transform this thing that, again, is going to add, it's going to be a value at. So, for example, like, I'll take the, you always want to create a master suite, yes? That's one of the things you want to do. And then we'll take the master, I'll push it in the back, where it opens into the backyard.

I almost always add if there's a, I'll replace a window with the French door where it opens up into the backyard. We're always trying to sort of bring the indoors, outdoors, and bring the outdoors in. And sort of, you know, we've got this great weather here in Southern California. And so, so that's one thing. So you have a formula. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got a formula for sure.

Okay. Keep going. Yeah. And so then one of the other things that I do, do that I like to do is so now you have this whole population 10, 15 years ago, maybe it wasn't such a big deal, but now you have all these people that work from home. And so I think what's important for a lot of home buyers is, you know, a home office. And so a lot of times what I'll do is I'll look for, you look for properties. If you find a property with a three-car garage, it's

awesome. What you do is you take a third of that garage. garage converted into a two-car garage and then convert the one-car garage into an office space. Smart. It's a good idea. Yeah. And so, and so, and then even we'll take a two-car garage, cut that in half, do a single-car garage, and do the office back there. And it's crazy, too. It's like, you know, I used to think that, and again, I think this is a little bit of sort of like

an old thinking mentality. It's like, you know, people have nice cars and they want to park their car in a garage. and I think that that is sort of a fallacy. People don't care. They just park them wherever. I know in my... And what's funny about that is every area is so different, right? So like in my area, if I can't, I can't sell a house without a garage because it rains 300 days a year, right?

So nobody wants to walk. So like, I know that my market, I have to build a garage if there's not a garage or just accept a huge loss on the property, you know, or accept a big discount. So it's interesting how like your market differs from my market. and people should know that, that every area has got its own little quirks, and that's why it's so important to know what works in your area. I love that. And the style, I mean, like, the ideas that you have are phenomenal,

and I think overall would probably work in a market like ours in Denver, but the same thing applies to what Brandon says. You know, you get these wicked snows in the winter and the spring. People want their cars covered up. So, you know, what works in SoCal doesn't necessarily work here, but I bet you there's some things here that, you know, amenities that you could build in to these types of flips that, you know, people over there wouldn't care about and would add value as well.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. And again, it's just like every time I look at a house, I try to see what we can do to sort of shift things around, open up spaces. A lot of times we'll blow out the ceilings if it's got a pitched roof. A lot of times we'll just add, you know, one of the easiest value ads is just adding on square footage. You're talking about actually add like a section of the house, like build a new foundation and...

Yeah, build a new foundation. I just picked up this home in Silver Lake and I think it's 1100 square feet and we're adding 600 square feet to the back of the house. Oh, wow. Nice. That's awesome. So, again, as I kind of pit through him before, you've got a formula that you generally use. I mean, it sounds like you know, you've got kind of a set of design standards that you go by. and you're looking for a house that meets a very specific set of criteria that even though

you're going to pay market price for these deals, you could turn around and actually make a fair amount of money. So what I was going to ask is what is kind of the average purchase price you're looking at? What are you generally putting into these things? And if you don't mind, what do you typically walk away with? Sure. So I'm going to back up just a little bit. But when I first started doing this in LA, in, gosh, it was 2007, 2008, I was, and again, this

was at the right when the recession hit and, you know, the sky was falling. I was picking up homes in the twos and the threes and selling them in the fours and the fives. Right on. Okay. And so now, gosh, I just picked up a home. Oh, another value ad? Can I go back to the value? Oh, yeah, please.

Yeah, so one of the other things that we look at is we take duplexes and convert them into single families. Yeah. And so if it's a side-by-side duplex or even if it's a stacked one, if there's a way where we can connect the two, I'm working on a side-by-side duplex. And so you go through the city of Los Angeles. There's Los Angeles's rent control. And so you have to go through a process with the housing department, which you can do. and we're doing, there's a lot more value in it being a single family than there is as a duplex. And so in that case, in that instance, I picked up the duplex was, gosh, it was nine.

It was like $900,000. And we're going to put $100,000, about $150 into it. And I think the future maker value is somewhere about $1.4. 5, 1.5. Wow. Right on. And what would you say? I'm just curious, in terms of you go into a house, do you have a typical amount that

you're like, this is my rehab budget average? Is it 30? Is it 50? Is it 100? What do you typically spend on a normal rehab? I've never spent 30. I've never spent 50. It's always north of 100 grand.

Wow, okay. Yeah. I've never spent north of 100 grand. Oh, wow. Okay. So like I said, like these houses that I get, There are these, again, these kind of older things. And again, in terms of value and in terms of where I can put value in and really sort of where I can make money,

is you just buy the most beater homes that you can. And I'll take the ones that are sliding off the hills and funky foundations and things that are sloped and leaning. And we go after all that. Nice. Have you ever lost money on a flip out of the hundreds you've done? Yeah. Do you mind me asking what's like the worst flip you ever did? Maybe you shouldn't ask me that question.

Yeah. I know, I mean, you know, it's funny. You know, I've lost money on maybe probably less than five. Okay. Like a handful. And every time, and it's been a while since I lost money on a flip, but I'll tell you, those ones are the best. You learn a lot. You learn a lot, yep.

Yeah. And so I remember this one, oh my gosh, it was up in the hills in this area of Mount Washington. And there was no parking. There was no garage. There was no parking. It was street parking only. And sort of one of my things is that it always, you know, we always have to, you know, we've got to give them a place to park. Especially when you create these nice homes.

And I thought foolishly that I could add a parking space to this thing. And it was set on a cliff. And needless to say, we ended. up selling at street parking only. And yeah, yeah. And it's funny too. The thing I was going to say about that is that, you know, I think for a lot of flippers, it is sort of, it's a, it's a risky business, yes.

And so it takes a certain, you have to have an appetite for risk. And there has to be, you have to go into it. I don't want to say it's arrogance, but there's just, you have to have a certain personality where you're going to just sort of plow through it. And in this case, let's just say I was a little too arrogant. Yeah. Was it, I mean, it sounds like the property probably would have done okay, but you made a bad assumption.

I mean, at the end of the day, this wasn't like you under or overestimated your costs, your rehab budgets, things like that. This was you just, you kind of made a bad assumption. And that assumption aside, there was probably a pretty good chance you would have walked away with profit. Is that correct? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Okay. So how could other folks who are doing flips avoid that? Because we haven't really talked too much about that. We always talk about not prepping for the budget, overestimating your sale price. But in this case, is there anything you could have done to have avoided that happening?

Yeah. I think, so one of the things that I always do when I purchase a home is you think about who the end buyer is going to be. Okay. And so I create this sort of like a almost like a customer profile in my mind. So, like, on one house, it might be like the single hipster guy. Another one, it might be like the working girl. It might be a family. And so then... You build for working girls? Yeah, why not?

Is there a pole in the middle? Strickers are people, too. Yeah, come on, Josh. Don't hate. And so I create a customer profile in my head, in my mind. And then you sort of build into what you think is going to be important to that customer. I love that. Yeah.

Like when I was first starting out in these neighborhoods, gosh, this was, you know, about 10 years ago. And the neighborhoods, they weren't, you know, we're going to call them transitional. And so, you know, parts of the neighborhood weren't as safe as they are today. And so, gosh, one of the things that I've thought was important for a home buyer was just to kind of give them like some security. and safety. And so a big part of our deal was just building like nice fences around the homes. And that's something that matters to a home bar. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I love that. I mean, like, yeah, to think of who, who it is, because a lot of times slippers will think, what do I want? Like, you know, oh, I would love to have this extra thing or this, I would love to have a three-car garage.

I can park my ATV. But then you're thinking, what's the buyer going to want? They're going to want a home office. So let's turn that into it. I think that's super smart. And what is the neighborhood support? And what is the- And what is the neighborhood support, you know, the other thing, too, is like, especially with a, you know, with a couple or a family, it's like, who is the person in that family that's going to have the last say? The wife. That's right.

That's right. And so then it's like, okay, well, what's important to the wife? And so what's, that's right. You're absolutely right. So it's the kitchen and it's the bathrooms. So she's going to tell me to cook dinner for her. Yeah. Which I don't do.

Oh, we're not talking about me. I'm sorry, because Benner always makes it about him. I confuse. You get confused a lot. It's okay. So, I like, again, I like that just to that thinking in terms of, you know, what do they want? What does she want? And what can we do to maximize it?

Heck yeah. And so it's like, and again, and if the wife, if there's something that the wife or the girlfriend doesn't like, they're going to keep looking. Yep. And so kind of knowing that in advance and knowing. that bathrooms and kitchens are important, it's like, you better make sure those are okay. And so then again, when you're looking at a house that you're touring properties or looking for potential flips, it's like if the kitchen's too small or if you can't create a master

suite or whatever that looks like, you know, you want to keep looking to. Yeah, cool. Can I ask you about contractors? Like, do you have better luck? Do you feel like than a lot of people because you're in such a large, you know, massive area like LA. Do you have a lot more contractors to choose from so you get better options? Or do you struggle like we all do with just getting good contractors to do good work for a reasonable price? Yeah. So for me, what I do is I'm always looking for new people. And so I've got

multiple crews going at any given time. And one of my rules of thumb is that I never give a contractor more than one home at a time. So they may be working on a couple homes at a time, but it won't be with me. And why do you do that? I had a situation. This was maybe six, seven years ago. I had five or six homes I was working on at the same time, and I gave them all to one contractor.

And the whole thing imploded. Nothing gets done. Nothing gets done. And he didn't have the bandwidth to take on so many projects. And so I learned from that. So now what I do is I've got my A team, my A team. my A team contractors. And then I have my B team who's training to be my A team.

And then what happens I found is that it just, you know, you work with the contractor over time. And then each time the prices for the bids, they seem to go up. They never, yeah, they never seem to go down. Oh, yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I always do as well is I always develop a super, super thorough scope of work and I walk the job with three contractors and and so by the time I pay sorry to interrupt really quickly you talked about walking with three contractors so are you walking the property

with three competing contractors at the exact same time no okay okay okay okay okay a little weird yeah that doesn't get a little weird and and the other thing the thing too is that every time I walk it with a contractor and I walk them individually is you learn something. They'll see something in the home that maybe I didn't see, and then I can add it to the scope of work, and I can amend the scope of work. So then by the time I've walked it with three contractors,

I've amended my scope of work, I've added some things, I've switched some things around, and then I give that to each one of the three guys, and then they give me their price. Can I ask a question for you? One thing that I deal with a lot when I'm dealing with contractors, especially on flips, and I'm doing it right now, is I get a contractor who will say,

for example, electrician comes out and says, I can do this job for 4,500. So you say, okay, great, 4, 400. And then they get in there, they start working. They're like, yeah, you know, it's a lot more than I thought. So actually, it's going to be 7,500. It's like just blows up like that. And a lot of times they tell me it after. So do you have any tips for dealing with like that kind of situation when contractors just add things on? Sure. Yeah. I think someone told me a while ago, your best price is always going to be your first price. And so where I think a lot of contractors try to make money, is at the back end with the change orders. And so, again, you want to develop your scope of work as thorough as possible.

And the other thing that I always put in my scope of work, so you open, again, especially with these old homes that I'm working on, you start peeling back walls and it's, you know, it's a mess. And so one of the things that I always put in my scope of work is to allow for 25% of replacement for framing, which is very generous, yes. And so every time you open up a kitchen, every time you open up a bathroom, you're always going to have some sort of rot behind the walls, which every contractor knows that. And so again, if you could build into your scope of work, a little bit of an allowance for that. But the thing that I tell guys is that if they come back to me and they just say, ah, you know, it was just like it was more work than I thought.

And I'm like, dude, this is what you do for living. Like, you're the contractor, you know? And so, and listen, you want to be fair and honorable and you want to, you want to do the right thing. And if it smells like a rat and walks like a rat, you know what I mean? Yeah. And so I think for those sort of things is sort of a case-by-case basis. But again, I think the lesson for me, thorough scope of work. Yeah, I think that's solid.

I know we just had a guy paint our house, like not our own personal house, but the flip that we're doing right now. He painted it. And he comes back at the end and says, yeah, you know, this is just a lot. a whole lot more work than I was thinking. I mean, we had to, my partner did all the mean more, but he had to basically yell at the guy and say, no, I'm not paying you a dime more because nothing came up. It was just him being, oh, you know, I just misjudged it. And we, yeah, we don't pay him a dime more, but he wasn't happy about that.

Yeah. And when I get that from contractors, I'm like, so explain to me, has something changed in the house? Yeah. Like, what changed here? That's what my partner said. He's like, yeah, actually, I went up on the roof and I pounded, you know, like a thousand nails into the siding right into the edge. that's what I did while you were sleeping last night, just like sarcasticly to the guy.

Yeah. And go ahead. I'm sorry. I was going to say, you know, I think one of the things a lot of people get afraid of, and what I've heard over the years, a lot of people are scared to get into flipping because they're afraid that's going to happen. And I get the whole, let's create an allowance. But, you know, contractors can so easily, you know, slap a mechanics lien on your property.

And so, you know, I think it's one of the things that, that, you know, I think it's one of the things that makes a lot of people fearful is, oh, well, what if I get into this and the contractor says that I owe more money because of this? And, you know, now he slaps a lien on the property. And I'm, I'm like, you know, I'm totally screwed. What do I do? What would you say to somebody who thinks that? Yeah. Again, I think you want to be honorable and you want to be fair. And it's not about screwing the other guy. Right. Okay. And after you've done as many deals as you had done, you do get that all of this is so relationship-based. And so if some guy's going to slap a lean on it,

I think you just got a sort of all of this can, so much of it I think can be resolved in a conversation and sort of understanding where the guy's coming from and try to get his position and hopefully he can get yours and you come to some sort of an understanding. Yeah. But again, you know, I keep going back to the scope of work. As long as that's been developed and it's thorough, there shouldn't be any misunderstanding.

And I think that where a lot of people run into problems is they'll walk it with the contractor and they'll say, yeah, you know, do this and do that and let's do this and let's do that. And, you know, none of it's written down. Yep. And that's the biggest problem I've run into is not writing things down where it's just like we have a handshake. We walk through the house. And then later it's like, oh, well, no, the painting didn't include the trim. And I'm like, well, of course it included.

include. No, no, it didn't. And then what do you do? So, yeah, lately, I actually created my own form. So the contractor will give me a bid. I have my own bid form now that I make them refill out or I fill out for them. And on there, it says, you know, any change orders must be approved ahead of time and all that stuff. And it's easier than to show them, hey, you sign this document, remember? And then that conversation, it always, you know, helps. I do the exact same thing. The other thing, too, that I do, I'm lucky enough in that all of my flips are within 15, 20 minutes of where I live. And so I go to the job site. It's like if not every day than every other day.

Okay. And so you see them there, you show up, even if you just show up for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, you walk the thing. Do you guys have any questions? What's going on? Dda, da, da, da. And just make sure that everyone's clear.

Yep, that's smart. That's great. Yeah, and the other thing too is that I know that some people are like, I don't want to go to my flips. You know, I want to spend as little time there as possible. The thing that I tell people all the time is, gosh, you know, how good your flips come out, a lot of it is predicated on how often you show up. And especially with your working with new contractors, you just want to make sure that everyone's in sync.

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Go to mine.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get your first month free, which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. Yeah, so I definitively would love to keep talking about flips, but, you know, we, we brushed by the condo conversions. And, you know, it's something that I'm particularly interested in. So I'd love to pick your brain on it. Yeah, I actually, I took a five family, turned it into a four once. And that actually turned out terrible. We did a terrible job on the conversion of the two units converting them into one. Just, you know, you, at least not on the condo conversion side, but you had talked about converting duplexes into single family. I've failed miserably on that. But, you know, the idea of taking an apartment and taking an apartment and turning that into an actual condominium, which you could then sell is, you know, it's pretty sexy for a lot of people. So what goes into that? You know, can you talk about, you know, how do you evaluate that deal? You know, how do you know, okay, if I buy this, you said you've been doing 12-unit apartment communities and converting those, how do you know if you

pay X for the apartment community, you're going to be able to extract Y on the duplexes of the single units that you convert out of it. You know, what other kind of costs going? Just kind of start brain dumping on this if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So the first one that we did, the first 12 unit that we did in, and again in the city, Costa Mesa, the application from the city was one page. Really?

And so it tells you, yeah. So this was, again, this was a good 10 years ago. And so the city was due to it as well. And in the past, what most of these guys were doing, these developers, is that they were taking these little kind of rental properties and just scraping them and building new. And so for most of the guys, that's where the money was. And so when we looked at our first, the 12 unit that we had, you know, we saw these kind of cute little bungalows. And the other thing, too, that we saw was we, like I said earlier, I was working in the surf industry down there.

And so in Orange County, you had all these great sort of industries and great companies, and you had kind of cool people working there. And I didn't, like the thing that we saw was that no one was really addressing this customer in terms of housing. And so, again, sort of creating this customer profile in advance, gosh, there wasn't any kind of like, quote, cool places to live. And so we were like, gosh, let's develop this kind of like cool little community for these cool little kids to buy these homes. And so we purchased this 12 unit little rental property. It wasn't in a great part of town. Again, you know, we call them transitional.

Very political. But we also had sort of a little bit of a like if we build it, they won't come sort of thing. And it worked out really good. And then in terms of sort of pricing it, it's sort of like doing a flip. and just scaling it up. Can you explain that? Yeah. It's, gosh, you want to look at you, okay, so when you go to assess your future market value,

and again, working on 12 units, 12 homes at one time, and going through the entitlement process with whatever city you're working with, it's a process. And it's going to take you, your calendar isn't going to be six months. It's going to be more like two years, which is what we were dealing with. So you want to make sure that you're sort of, you have a, you try to understand a little bit like what the market's going to do, a little bit of it's a crystal ball and sort of looking into the future like, okay, you know, and then you can base it on price per square foot. It's just you're going to assess, you're just going to assess a future market value.

And then the purchase price of the land, so we purchased this piece of land. I don't even remember what we paid for at the time, but there were 12 units. you take the purchase price divide by 12, that gives you your land value. We already had buildings on there. We already had our little structures on there. And then so that was really just sort of like a rehab thing. And then we assigned whatever our budget was for that. So it was kind of like a flip times 12.

You just have to think about it from a different angle. Yeah. Yeah, you have to think about it from a different angle. The holding costs for me is the interesting thing. that 12 month, not the 12 month, but you said, you know, it looked like it was about two years just in dealing with the city. Now, that's before you could even do work, or is that, you know. To go through the entitlement process where you have to develop, it's called a track map, and you go through, and it's like taking the property and all of the 12 units are considered

sort of one piece of property, and then you develop the track map, and that takes each little unit and you can peel off each little unit and sell them individually. And so that process takes about six months. Got it. So, I mean, all in all, before you even start working or doing any kind of physical work, there's a long period of time here. There's a long period of time. And when we purchased the property, we had tenants in there.

And so we were generating a little bit of rent. You know, it was a little bit run down and we weren't getting great rents. There was also, because we had tenants, I think we had to give them six months notice. serve them and then they had six months to get out got it so but but for people who are thinking about doing this this is not like hey you slap lipstick on a pig flip it and you're done this is not a three-month process i mean you've got significant carrying costs potentially on something like this it's it's not a three-month process you have to develop the whole HOA which there are companies that do that for you but you've got to develop that and then there's the whole the uh after

you're finished with it, you got to sell them. And so it takes a little bit longer to sell 12 units than it does one home. Yeah. And one of the things that I was going to say about that project, so we finished our project, and then we have this great little community, and then there were no real estate agents that we were really, like, super thrilled with. And so we ended up holding the open houses ourselves, me and my partner. And again, I don't know what our conversion rate was,

but for every, who knows, thousand people that come through the open house, you might sell one unit. So we held a lot of open houses, but I have to tell you, so working those open houses and watching people go through those units was some of the greatest,

it was one of the greatest experiences I got in terms of, again, what's important to people, what matters to people. It was like getting a PhD and, you know, home buying 101 or whatever. It was an amazing experience. Right on. Well, let me kind of follow up. So that was that first property.

You went and did it again, correct? Yeah, we did it again in Costa Mesa. Cool. Was it the same build? I mean, it was also... Yeah, just coincidentally enough, it was again, it was a 12-unit thing. And we went through the same process with the city going through the entire. process and developing a track map and all that. And we came out with this great product and our

timing was terrible. Oh, this was the 07 one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So that was very bad timing. And I did want to circle back on that. So, you know, how did that play out? So what happened was, so we had to raise, gosh, we had to raise a couple million dollars. And most of the, you know, money that we raised was friends and family and I put money into it my partner put money into it and everyone lost their money and again you know there's always lessons and all these things and I I remember there was at one point and again this was sort of like the economy did what it did and and just everything it was just chaos yeah and so I remember there was this one meeting where we had all of the investors

in our lawyers office and again friends and family and it was you know people got people got emotional but at the end of the after all of the dust settled and again people lost their money i lost a couple hundred grand off of that deal uh i had one of the guys come up to me and he says gosh you know he goes you guys did a great job and you you did what you said you were going to do you came out with these homes and you spent what you know we didn't go over budget we didn't end up with like this terrible product the the homes came out great and so you can we could at least say gosh it just we did what what we did what we did and the economy did what the economy did right would you do it again would you do a condo conversion

now i think you've got i think you want to be open to like kind of everything and yeah so i would i I wish for sure do it. Okay. Okay, cool. So before we move to the fire round, you know, you've been in the game for a bit now. You've, you know, done a ton of flips. You've done a few condo conversions. I know we didn't talk about it, but you're getting into rentals now.

What gets you going? What excites you about this business? Why do you do it? I mean, it sounds like you had a cool job at Quicksilver. Why on earth are you dealing with all the hassles and headaches of flipping houses and all this stuff? What do you like about it? I love everything about it. It's like the best job in the world.

And gosh, I love the process. I love making a difference in these communities. When I first started flipping homes up in northeast Los Angeles, there was this neighborhood, this town called Pileland Park. And the work that we did and a couple of other people did, we contributed to the transformation of that whole neighborhood. It was remarkable. And so it's just great to be part.

of something a little bit bigger in terms of being able to sort of turn a neighborhood. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. And so I love that. And then one of the other things that I love doing when I got into this, when I got into flipping is I started this, we coined this term called the slow flip. And so the slow flip is, well, I'm going to back up a second. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of people think, or,

there's this notion that flipped homes are done cheaply and sort of not very well quality. And so, and so I was like, gosh, let's see if we can't transform that whole idea of what a flipped home can be. And so we've taken on, and when I say we, I've taken on like putting a little bit, you know, paying a little bit more attention to the design and to the details and to the quality. And the other thing that I do is that when I sell my homes, I've got the name of my company as Better Shelter. We brand our homes and we put the name in front. And so I always brand my homes with the Better Shelter brand. And we've come to be known as this brand, as these people that put out this product, i.e. flipped homes.

And there's something people can trust the brand. That's great. brand brand is key you know i mean you you can do it without branding but if you're trying to to go long term branding is really important so i i i think it's awesome yeah i was going to say i again you know we spoke about it a little bit earlier you know the real estate world is so small and so at the end of the day really sort of all you have is your reputation yeah and and i want to make sure that the that the work that i'm putting out is like quality work and And like I bump into my homebuyers like at the coffee shop and I see them in the streets.

And I, you know, and you want to make sure you can kind of like look them in the eye and you want to make sure that they're happy. And again, people are going to be living in these homes for the next 30 to 50 years or whatever. And you want to make sure you give them a good product. I love that. That's great. I love that you brand them. And so people, other agents maybe can say, oh, this is one of Steve's properties. You know, like I love that reputation you build.

That's great. Like you said, real estate. I mean, L.A. is big, but real estate is small. no matter where you are. And so your name gets around. Real estate small. Yeah, agents talk to one another. Again, on the kind of on the going in, you want to,

agents want to make sure that you can close. And then on the sell side, they want to make sure that their clients are going to be getting a property. Everyone's sort of reputation is resting on this stuff. Yeah. I love that. Well, cool. I got two more quick questions for you before we move on to the fire round.

And the first one is really quick. How many hours a week do you work, typically? That's a good question. 30 hours a week. Okay. All right. Okay. And then last question I have before the fire round, do you have any tips for our listeners who are just starting out and they want to flip houses but they live in an expensive area?

What's your best tip for somebody who's in that position? I think, you know, my advice to them would be to focus on a neighborhood. And so, again, in Los Angeles, you've got so many these little neighborhoods and become an expert in that neighborhood. And then once you're an expert in that neighborhood and you kind of have an understanding for, you know, what homes, you know, the buy and the side. and all that sort of stuff, go out and raise some money. I love it. Because again, to get into these homes, it takes a lot of capital. And, you know, it's funny, there's a lot of people that operate, that come from, like, money is scarce.

Yeah. But the flip side of that is that there's actually so much money out there. And there's so many people with so much money and they don't know what to do with it. Yeah. And so I think for an investor, like, you know, someone that's getting into the game, it's like, gosh, if you can tap into some of those people and show to them that look at if you do X, Y, and Z with me, your money is going to make this kind of a return. Yeah.

Fantastic. And really what you're doing is you're providing an opportunity for the people with the money. Yeah, that's the huge right there, that transition between thinking I'm asking for money versus I'm offering an opportunity. I mean, this is huge. Yeah. And I think the pitfall for a lot of people is that they're walking around. with their hand out going, oh, can you help me?

I need help. Exactly. That sounds like. And when it really is like, listen, you guys, this is an opportunity for you. This is an opportunity for you to make money. And the thing that I tell people all the time is that I, you know, some of the deals I do on my own, some of them my partner with equity partners. And, you know, my job is to make all of my partners rich.

Yep. There you go. I love it. And if they're rich, you're rich. So it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Cool.

All right. Well, hey, let's shift gears and head over to world famous Fire Round. It's time for the Fire Round. The Fire Round questions. These come direct out of the Bigger Pockets forums. These are real-life members of BP who are asking questions. And every one of these questions has tons of answers anyway in the forums, because our forums are amazing like that.

But I'm going to throw them at you and get your opinion. All right, the first question of the Fire Round. I am a brand new house flipper. and I want to do all my own work on the property. Is that a bad idea? I think it's a bad idea. And I think that you want to look at what is your value that you can bring to this. And I think that you want to leave the painting to the painters,

and I think you want to leave the electrical work to the electricians. And so where the investor's value is going to come in is sort of just kind of managing the whole process. Because there are a lot of moving parts to the process, as we all know. Right on. Terrific. All right, my question, who typically picks up materials that will be used to rehab a house such as tile, fixtures, cabinets? Is that the GC an interior designer, the investor? What do you do and what do you think it should be for other people?

Yeah, so what I do is I try to develop systems and structures that are repeatable. And so again, after you've done a bajillion flips, if you try to do everything different, every single time, you'll just jump off a cliff. Having said that, you always want to try to be improving what you did before, and you want to try to stay, you know, just sort of, listen, if I was doing the same stuff on my flips 10 years ago that I am doing now, I wouldn't have the success that I've had. And so I think that for me, I am responsible for all of the kind of the fit and finish stuff that hits the job site.

And so again, but what I do is you have all of. of these accounts set up, so to kind of order the tile, it takes four minutes, seriously. I'm smart. Got it. Cool. It's not like a big thing. Yeah. And you want to make sure that the guys that they could deliver it to the site and you don't

want to be running around picking all that stuff up. Yeah, that's for sure. All right. Number three, this was a little bit longer. It's kind of a story, but see if you can follow me here. I recently graduated from college and I work a nine to five job like most people do in the world. But I'm trying very hard to get my foot in the door of real estate investing. I've been very passionate about real estate. I just don't know where to begin as my first investment. What I'm

looking for is some guidance or any advice that you can give me as to what a good starting point would be. Sure. I think, again, I would identify a neighborhood or identify a couple of neighborhoods. And one of the things that you can start doing is just start going to open houses and start talking to real estate agents there. And then you'll be amazed at what people. will tell you the information that people will give you just by asking questions and so walking into some home let's say you want to be a flipper you walk into a home that you know some sort of a flip opportunity and just talk to the real estate agent hey walk me through this house what do and then the other thing that you can do is just hang out in the open house and watch other people walk

through it you'll be amazing a great idea that's a really good idea yeah and then can I say something else about that? Please. Is that on your back end, after you've finished your home and you have your flipped home listed and for sale, if you can hang out in the open house and sort of be like a fly on the wall, it's amazing what you'll learn watching people walk through your house. I've never done that, but I love that suggestion. I love that. Yeah.

I think for a lot of people, once they've finished the home, you know, it can be an arduous task. And so by the time you're finished, you're like, I'm over this thing. But there's actually there, you want to make sure that you're in communication with your real estate agent. You want to make sure you get the feedback. You want to ask the real estate agent for feedback. If you can't go to one of the open houses, you'd be amazed at what you learn. That's great. That's great. All right, last question of the fire round. Should I invest where I live or invest where I know the market if they're different? Yeah. You know, know, for me, I've never, all of my investing has been locally. And so I'm one of those guys

where I like to see it and touch it. I hear about all the people that do it out of state. I don't, it's just, that's not what I do. And so I think that you live in the area and you know the area. And again, to be able to drive to the house that you're working on, there's a ton of value there. Yeah, got it. Good answer. I'm going to ask one more question to the fire round, just because I'm curious. How long does your typical flip take from beginning to sale? From purchase to sale?

Yeah, from what I tell people, from close of escrow to close of escrow, six months. Okay. Yeah. Right on. Oh, it's me. All right, so let's, uh, sorry, it was dozing off there.

All right, let's go to the world famous. Famous for... These questions are the same questions we've been asking for 170 some shows now, and I love hearing the answer every time. So number one, what is your favorite real? estate related book.

Okay. So you've heard it a million times before. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Okay. Fair enough. I agree. It's just transformational. I recommend it for everyone.

Cool. I agree. Fully agree. All right. Favorite business book? So favorite business book is, can I, so I'm going to back up a little bit. So when I was working at Quicksilver, I designed all of the retail stores. And so, again,

it was sort of like you got this education on like kind of what's important to people what people respond to and so a book i read back then was it was by an author's name's paco underhill and it's called how we buy and so it's the science and the study of how people shop okay and so you can take that same technology and science and apply it to a home buyer and so what i mean by that again watch people when they come into an open house and you see what they respond to and you see what they what's important to them and what matters to them and you can take that and apply it to the next home that you flip that's awesome awesome that's great that's great what do you do for fun outside of real estate i oh gosh i uh i grew up on the beach uh i'm a surfer so i love going to the beach i love

going surfing. I love going to flea markets and collecting old stuff. And I just, you know, all these old homes that I fix up, they're these old homes again from the 20s and the 30s. I just like love old stuff. Yeah, me too. That's cool. Nice. That's awesome. All right. My final question of the day. What do you believe sets apart successful investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started. You know, I think you just got to put yourself in the mindset. And I think for a lot of investors and especially real estate investors, sometimes it can get kind of lonely and a little bit isolated.

And so you want to surround yourself with like-minded people. And you want to be in communication and conversation with other people doing the same thing. And I think that Bigger Pockets is a great example. of that. And I also want to acknowledge both of you guys for creating this like amazing community where people can just log on and get like a hit of inspiration. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that. I'll defer to Josh for building it. I, you know, I make things look prettier sometimes, but it's about it. So cool. Come on, Brandon. You know you like taking credit. Yeah, I'll take credit. Yeah. And listen, like, and also like just listening to the

podcasts, it's like, it's just, you get so much juice off of all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that's crazy. The podcast for me, I mean, just listening, obviously I'm doing the interviews, but just like that constant every week discussion with somebody who's smarter than me, like it just, it, it means so much to me in my investing. Like, it always pushes me for it always challenges me. And I love that. So I, yeah, I think so. And I think with the thing for the real estate investor is you got to be someone defined development to me as wild optimism. And so you just, you know, there's a million reasons. I can give you a million reasons why not to do it, right?

Yeah. But at some point in time, you just got to like, you just got to go for it and you just got to do it. And listen, for every novice flipper investor out there, you're going to make the mistakes. everybody has. I still make them. And it's like, that's kind of part of the process too. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. That's great advice. Great advice. All right. Well, Steve, before we let you go, where can people find out more about you? Where can they connect with you? So my company is Better Shelter. So I'm on Twitter at Better Shelter, Instagram, better shelter, better shelter.com.

Just better shelter. Perfect. And, of course, they can find you on bigger pockets as well. Yeah. and better shelter there. Perfect. All right. Well, Steve,

thank you so much. We really do appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah. Thank you so much, Brandon. Thank you so much, Josh.

You guys are great. Awesome. Thanks. See around. You could have thanked me first, but it's okay. That's fine. Don't worry about it.

I didn't think anything of it. No, it's all good. Josh has a little complex here. Josh has a little complex. Notice the giant is calling it a little complex. Interesting.

Interesting. Literally. All right. Steve, see later. Thanks so much. Appreciate you guys. Thank you.

All right. That was Steve Jones. Show 173 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. You can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 173. Great stuff. Great stuff. I love how he does it because we're talking about a market that is not inexpensive market. And he's just being really creative about how he finds properties and converts them

makes money off them. I mean, a lot of people who haven't been in the game for a long time might look at their same properties and say, I can't flip that. There's no way to make money there. But he's got this formula and it's great. Yeah, I love things that stand up for me was like the hidden value, finding that hidden value, talking, figuring out what does the buyer want, not what do I want? I mean, those things were just solid piece of advice. I think that anybody can take and use. Very cool. Total gold. Totally gold. Absolutely. Fantastic, man. Well, I don't know. What else? I'm going to go get a heat pad and put it on my back. I'm sore, man.

Poor old man. I know you and I got to play some racquetball someday. We should. I wonder who would win. I don't know. I'm pretty darn good. I lost a lot today. You're like wingspan covers the entire range of the...

Oh yeah, I don't move. I just stand there and just hit, you know, it's easy, you know, because I'm 20 feet tall. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, you're like, you know, stretch Adams or whatever that toy was. There you go. Stretch Armstrong. Armstrong. He was the coolest toy.

I love that thing. Yeah. Nice. Was that your inspiration? That was. I was like, I'm going to be that guy. So I, every day I would like stretch my legs and arms, so I'd be nine feet 12 tall. That's great.

All right, man. Let's get out of here. You guys, join folks just like Steve on the Bigger Pocket site. Create your accounts today, biggerpockets.com. Put together a free account. You can connect, network, interact with people, tons and tons and tons of unlimited free content. It's amazing. So if you're a listener of the podcast and haven't checked out the site,

it would behoove you to do so. If this is inspiring, wait until you actually read and see what people are talking about and doing. So jump on the site today. With that, I'm out of here. Josh Dorkin, sign in all. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype,

you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K.

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