BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 653: Tarek El Moussa on Why Flopping While Flipping is The Way to Win

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

You’ve probably seen Flip or Flop before. Even if you’re not a home flipper, it’s hard to not get sucked into the glitz and glamor of watching Tarek El Moussa and his team rip out old fixtures from the 1950s and replace them with brand new, beautifully designed upgrades. Tarek is one of the most recognized home flippers in the world and has inspired thousands of others to start building wealth through real estate. He’s an inspiration to all of us, but how did he get to such a peak point? Tarek wasn’t a great flipper right out the gate. He electrocuted and burned himself on his first deal, but that wasn’t enough to deter him. Before the great recession, Tarek was living large, making forty-thousand dollars a month in his early twenties. But when the crash came, he had to sell everything and start from scratch. After attending a real estate seminar he caught the flipping bug and realized he needed to invest in real estate full-time. After a successful first flip, he pitched the idea of Flip or Flop to different television networks, with HGTV finally giving him a chance. He describes the first season of Flip or Flop as working eighteen-hour days, constantly stressing, and forcing himself to build a business, not just a side-hustle. This allowed him to delegate by buying more flips and building wealth faster. Funnily enough, his main piece of advice for flippers isn’t to try and make more money—it’s to start losing it instead. In This Episode We Cover: Tarek’s five house flipping tips that anyone can use to successfully start flipping The single biggest mistake that most flippers (and investors) make Flipping while filming and how to pitch a TV show as a complete novice Why finding real estate deals is the most important thing a house flipper can do Knowing your market and the key metrics to look for when investigating an area Designing a renovation that will beat out the comps in your neighborhood  And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast Get Your Ticket for BPCon 2022 Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram Rob's BiggerPockets Profile Rob's Youtube Rob's Instagram Rob's TikTok Rob's Twitter Enroll In the BiggerPockets Bootcamps and Get 10% Off Using Code “BOOTCAMP10” Do You Make These 7 Deadly House Flipping Mistakes? Books Mentioned in the Show: Long-Distance Real Estate Investing by David Greene The Book on Flipping Houses by J Scott Connect with Tarek: Invest with Tarek and His Team Tarek's Instagram: @therealtarekelmoussa Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-653 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show, 653. The only difference between a successful real estate investor and an unsuccessful real estate investor is the successful one kept going when they wanted to quit. Okay? I wanted to quit so many times. I remember thinking, there's no way in hell this is going to work. You're telling me I can pick up a phone, call strangers, and they're going to sell me their house under market.

I'm like, there's no way this is going to work. But I did it anyway. What's going on, everyone? This is David Green, you're host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast here today with my co-host, Robo Roberto Ava Solo, as well as a fire guest. Rob and I will be interviewing Tarik El Moussa of Flip or Flop.

If you watch TV, if you have a spouse or partner that watches TV, you have likely come across Tarak's show, where he is filmed in the process of, of flipping houses and walking through the different hurdles, challenges, and obstacles that come. In today's show, Rob and I get behind the scenes as to what it's like to flip houses on TV, how Targ is able to continue to find new deals even while filming a TV show, and a whole bunch of hilarious and insightful stories of things that went wrong in his deals and what he learned about him.

Rob, what are some of your favorite parts of today's show? You know, I just want to say, you seem extra chipper today, and I think it's because you won the bet at the end. I was going to dethrone you for the intro today. And I was like, this is it. This is my time to step up and give the intro on the bigger pockets platform. But we had a very fun bet at the end where we play a little game called Real or Reality TV where we guess if facts about Tarek are true or not. So definitely stay tuned to that. I think that was a fun part, man. We had a pretty good laugh on that one. That was a lot of fun. Make sure you listen all the way to the end because we do play a game where Tarek tells us if we are guessing if what happened was

real or if it was reality. So without any further ado, we're going to bring in Terrick in a second, but first, let's get to today's quick tip will be. Impraised failure. It's okay. It's going to happen. And the show Tarik talks about how if you're not losing money on flips, at least if you're doing this at volume and you have significant resources, you're not doing enough flips and you're actually leaving a lot of money on the table. So don't be afraid of failure. Instead, renegotiate your relationship with it. And if you'd like to reduce and mitigate your risk, check out the bigger Pockets forums where you can ask people questions about issues that you've run into, corners that you've painted yourself into, or advice that you need to make your flip go better.

You've upgraded how to buy properties, but did your insurance get the memo? When investors start scaling, insurance can't be an afterthought. Most policies were designed for a single property, not multiple rentals, LLC ownership, short-term stays, or properties mid-rehab. That's where blind spots can creep in. NREG works exclusively with real estate investors. They understand portfolios, how risk compounds as you, grow and why insurance should protect your upside, not just a checkbox. One uncovered claim can

undo years of progress. Before your next acquisition, review your insurance. Talk to NREG and get investor-specific coverage from specialists who actually understand real estate at NRE.com slash BPPod. That's N-R-E-I-G.com slash BP pod. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy, and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly. That's why more real estate investors are turning to steadily. They focus exclusively

on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builder's risk policy, or mid-term holiday guests. You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage. liability, and even loss of rental income. Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage. Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance. Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress?

Here's a better question. What if you could buy brand new construction homes, 10% below market value, in the best markets across the country, without making real estate your second job. That's exactly what rent to retirement does. They're a full service, turnkey investment company, handling everything for you. In some cases, investors get 50 to 75% of our down payment back at closing,

plus interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've partnered with BiggerPockets for over a decade, helping thousands invest smarter. If you want to do the same, visit BiggerPockts.com slash retirement to learn more. All right, without any further ado, let's bring in Tarik. Tarak El Musso, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcasts. How are you today? I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I understand you met my former co-host and best friend Brandon Turner out in Hawaii. Is that true? That is absolutely true. And I must say, he is one of the best guys I've ever met in my life. And I'm sure you can say the same.

Yeah, he's, I mean, you hear him on the show and he's very likable and he's very charismatic. but he's one of those few human beings that is even better in person. It's hard to have anything bad to say about that guy. Yeah, it was so random. So I was just going to Maui with my family. And randomly, I followed him on Instagram because I love everything he does. And he's such an amazing entrepreneur. So I sent him a message.

I'm like, hey, man, I'm in Hawaii. We should get together. And he's like, sure. And the only time our schedules lined up was like at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning before leaving for our flight. So him and his wife came down. me and Heather had breakfast with them and I just I couldn't say more nice things about the two of them. That's awesome, man. So for those of our listeners that live under a rock, or maybe they're hearing this podcast for the first time, or maybe they just found out about real estate and don't know who you are, can you give us a little background into what your business looks like, how your TV show works and a little bit about you?

Sure. You know, I got into the real estate industry at 20 years old. And before that, I was, delivering pizza and selling kitchen knives. First six months in the business of real estate, I made zero dollars. Nothing. And I was a kid and I was like, man, I was about to quit the business. Long story short, there was a free event coming into town from this real estate trainer named Mike Ferry. Most people in real estate know Mike Ferry. I went to this free event. At the end of this thing, I thought, man, I can do anything. This guy, the way he was able to speak to the audience, he could convince you that anything is possible. So he could. He could convince you. So he convinced me that anything was possible. I signed up for coaching and my life changed. You know,

within 90 days of signing up from coaching. I went from living in my mom's garage. My parents got divorced. She rented out my bedroom and followed exactly what my coach told me. And literally overnight, 21 years old started making 40,000 bucks a month. Within a few months, I bought my first million dollar house and thought I was king of the world, smartest guy alive, blah, blah, blah. the ego was so big and something interesting happened. It was the year 2007. So 2007 taught me that everything I thought I knew, I actually didn't know. So I had to sell my houses. I had to sell my cars, I had to sell everything I owned. But you know, I never quit real estate, man. And I kept selling. I kept selling. And I did the short sale transaction. There was a first lien, a second lead,

an HOA lien, an IRS lien. I mean, this thing was a nightmare. And this was the wild. West back then, guys, you know, because there was no systems in place. There was no technology. Like, you called the bank for a short sale. There's a 10% chance anyone cares. There's a 5% chance. Someone's going to call you back. Long story short, I worked it for about a year. At the end of the day, I got to check for about $7,000. I sold it to an investor, paying in the house, hired a gardener, flipped it a week later, made like $127,000. And that was the moment I realized I was on the wrong side of the equation. I was like, man, I got to be a real estate investor. So I had one big problem. I had no money. So of course, I went to everybody I knew. And you know what they said?

They said no. They said I was too young. It's too risky. I don't know what I'm doing. Like, they gave me every reason why they wouldn't give me money. And every time someone told me it wouldn't work, I was like, man, I can't wait to prove you wrong. So, So what I found was I was asking everybody in my sphere, everybody in my circle. And then I decided, I'm going to ask some people with money. So I approached the one person I knew at the time who had money. I showed him the business plan. He's like, yeah, you find a deal, I'll flip houses with you. And the deal was pretty simple. He put up the capital. I found the deal did all the work, sold the house. We split profits 50-50. That was 12 years ago today. And to this day, we're still business partners. So we did our first flip. It was a condo

in Santa Ana, California. And man, I did everything wrong. See, I had zero construction knowledge. I had zero construction background, but I was hungry. I was young and hungry. So I was the project manager. I was the contractor. I was the investor. I was the real estate agent. I electrocuted myself on that project. I did. I had this brand new vanity light. My ex-wife, she's like, oh, let's see what it would look like up on the wall. So I take this metal light and I put it up to the wires hanging out of the wall. Well, I didn't know what live wires were. Next thing, I know I'm shaking. There's sparks going everywhere.

And that's where I learned before you put metal near power, you got to make sure the power's off. Another thing I did is I acid washed the shower walls, but I made the mistake of not putting shoes on. I took my sandals off, so then I burned my feet with acid. I mean, you name it, I did it. But the one thing I did right was I showed up every single day. And I learned as I went. I got I got that first condo done, start to finish, construction, listing, closed in escrow and under 60 days all by myself. I made a check for $34,000.

And I remember, man, it felt like $34 million. And I was like, there's no way I'm ever going back. And then I learned something really important at the end of that first deal. I finished the transaction, but you want to know what I didn't have? I didn't have any more flips. And I didn't have any more flips. It's because I was doing demo. I was painting walls.

I was replacing flooring. And then I realized opportunity cost. I can make $34,000 flipping the house. Why am I painting walls and why am I doing trash out? So after my very first project, I decided I want to do more houses, but hire people to do the work. And here's where the tricky thing comes in. my TV career. So right when I bought that very first flip, I went to a real estate convention in Las Vegas.

It was thrown by a gentleman named Mike Ferry. There was about 5,000 people in this room. It's called the Superstar Retreat. And I was a guy that used to sit in the back. You know, it's Vegas. I was out late. I wasn't feeling so good in the mornings. And my friend was the vice, or is the vice president of Berkshire Hathaway office.

And his manager and his manager's wife were in the very front road. of this thing and they had to leave. So he invited me and my ex-wife to go sit in the front row. And you guys know how these events are. The front rows for the VIP people. That's for the guys and the gals that make a lot of money. That's for the players, the ballers. So we didn't really belong. But we were dressed sharp. We sat in the front row and at the break everybody else in the front row. They were wondering, well, who are these two young kids? We've never seen them before. You know, we looked good. You know, we were just sharp. We played the part. So I ended up talking to this guy at the break and he was telling me how he had a local TV show and he would go to the grocery

stores in Palm Springs, California and people would recognize him. And I was like, that's interesting. And I heard him talking on stage. He had made $800,000 that year. I said, I mean, it's cool being recognized and all, but like, what does that do? And he goes, well, they recognize me. Then they trust me and then they work with me. And I was like, man, that is so smart. So light bulb went off and I'm like, man, I got to get on TV. Like, this guy is smart. So I think the day or two days after, I went home and I was thinking about what this guy told me. And I was like, man, I got to get on TV.

I got to get on TV. And I told my ex-wife, it was like 10 o'clock at night. She's like, are you coming to bed? I was like, no. I was like, we got to get on TV. She's like, what are we going to get on TV for? She started laughing at me. I looked at her and I was like, you know what?

We just bought our very first flip. What if we flip houses on TV? She shook her head at me, laughed, and walked upstairs and went to bed. I stayed in front of my computer. I literally Googled Hollywood production companies. And then they came up. I went to the first one. They had a button and said, casting.

I sent an email. This is who I am. This is what I do. I want to flip houses on TV. I woke up the next day and they said send me a home video. So that condo I did in Santa. Anna where we paid $1.15, I actually documented the process and sent it to the production company. They loved it. They're like, we want to come out and do a two-day professional shoot.

So now this is my first time dealing with TV. Like never in my life had I even thought about TV. They come out. We shoot for two days, real director, real cameras, everything. We made a sizzle video. A sizzle video is like a three to five minute video of what the show could be. So then they take that sizzle video and they sent it out to all the networks. And guess what? Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted it. And I was like, man, that sucks. But that's life. So I just kept going. 10 months later, I'm on the golf course. I get a call from the production company. And they're like, you're not going to believe this, but HETV wants to do a pilot of a house flipping show. I couldn't believe it. I was getting a pilot for a TV show. So I shot the pilot in summer of 2011.

and it got done, it went to the network, and everybody's telling me the odds of a pilot getting picked up are very slim. And if we do get picked up or we do get an answer, it's not going to be for a long time because everything in TV is slow. I think it was maybe two, three weeks later, I get a call, I get an email, and I have a contract to flip 13 houses on global TV in 10 months. And as you can imagine, you'd be thinking I'd be celebrating, right guys? Well, I'm thinking how am I going to find that many houses to flip that are good deals? Two problems. One, I don't know how to flip houses. Uh-huh.

Problem number two, I have no money. Okay. So I called my lawyer at the time. Funny story with my lawyer is my first lawyer. He was a referral. I sent him the contract. I say, can you review this? He wrote back, yeah, no problem.

I need a $2,500 retainer. And at the time, I didn't have $2,500. So I wrote back my lawyer. I was like, can you do a payment plan? He's like, yeah, he, L.O.L. Yeah, I'll do a payment plan. No problem. To this day, he's still my lawyer and one of my best friends in the world.

So I asked him, I was like, man, so like, what if I sign this thing and I can't flip these houses? And he goes, well, I mean, they could sue you. And I looked around my apartment at the time. And I looked back at him. I said, you know what, they can have it. If I don't pull it on, they can have all of it. It's all financed anyway, so they can take it. So what I did is this.

I learned how to flip houses season one of that show. I created a proven track record where I got other investors to start giving me money. And then that first investor that did that first deal with me saw that I was serious. And he really went all in with me. And he said, I will be your capital partner. or you go find those houses. So my first year on TV, I really didn't sleep because I needed to find houses. And I was buying some of them at the auction.

The reason I had to buy them at the auction is because we need to start filming now, as you can imagine, right? But then when you're buying at the auction, I couldn't buy an occupied house because what if it takes me six months to evict them? How do I start filming a show if I have tenants in the house? So what I did is I would work all day until 8, 8.30 at night, my normal real estate stuff. I'd get home about 9 o'clock, eat a quick dinner, and then I would do prep work. And almost every night from 10 p.m. till about 3, 4 a.m., I would hit the, I would drive all throughout Southern California overnight. And I would drive by all the addresses that were going to the auction the next morning. The reason I drove by the addresses is because I wanted to see if anyone lived at the houses.

I looked for overgrown grass. I looked for newspapers by the front door. I looked for lights on. I look for cars in the driveways. So if it was three in the morning, I'm driving my houses. If I didn't think anyone lived there, I would say, okay, I can bid on that house. So then, of course, I work all night. I pick four houses I could bid on, right? I go to the auction. My max bids $300,000, right, on a house.

Next thing I know, the investor next to me bids $310. This guy bids $3.30. Next thing, I know the funds are, they're bidding $400,000. My max bids $300,000. how am I ever going to get a house? Right? Like how do I get a house? My numbers were way off.

But I never quit. I showed up every single day until one day I bit on the house. And for some reason, nobody else bid against me and I got the house. And I flipped it and I made a profit. So here's what I learned at the auction. If I showed up every single day and I worked like a crazy man every single day, I was going to get lucky. Nothing more than getting lucky.

For one reason or another, people just didn't realize to bid on that specific house, and I would get a house, then that's what would happen. I'd get outbid, out bit, out bid, out bid, and then every now and then I'd get a house. And that's how I started getting houses for the show. And then I started prospecting listing agents to buy their short sales. And then I created systems.

And then I would doork. So I did everything humanly possible. And because I signed that contract, I put myself in a position where I couldn't fail. because if I failed, I lose everything. So I did 10 years of work in one year, and that's why my business went like this. And the rest is history, man. I've done 10 seasons of flipper flop.

I have my new show working on season three right now, Flipping 101, where I'm mentoring rookie flippers. And we just announced our new show called The Flipping El Mousas with me and my wife, Heather El Moussa. So a little known fact here, I actually shot a sizzle for H. TV and probably not even supposed to say that. They were like very hush, hush about it. Didn't get picked up. All good. This all happened while the bigger pockets thing was coming to light. And I was really excited about this opportunity because what really scared me about the TV world was the concept was around my tiny house village that I was building out in Tennessee.

And we were going to be shooting these 14 hour days, which I'm sure you're really familiar with. But the question I kept asking myself and asking the producer is, how in the world, am I going to be able to do production and maintain the actual workflow of, you know, not flipping, but completely constructing these tiny houses and tree houses and everything like that. So I'm really interested to know, did the actual workflow of flipping a house change pretty dramatically once the cameras were on? That's actually a great question. Like the biggest hurdle for me was how am I able to film a TV show all day, but also prospect for sellers, negotiate deals, walk properties, hire contractors, and get them sold. So TV actually did something very special for me. The first year almost killed me.

But because it almost killed me, I was working like 18, 20 hour days. It forced me to become an entrepreneur, meaning it forced me to learn how to delegate. So I knew I can't be in 10 places at one time. time. So I need to fight, I need to start finding people to replace what I was doing. So it taught me to scale. It taught me to be a leader. It taught me to be a CEO. Because I'm on camera, I still needed all the work to get done. So I had to hire salespeople. I had to hire managers. I had a higher marketing. And I had to build a company. So I went from being a guy that was flipping houses to a guy that was building a real estate investment company to manage those projects while I was creating a TV show. In the first couple years, I mean, I was very, very hands-on because I had no choice.

But now, obviously, I'm more focused on the TV side of things. And in place of me, I have many employees in many systems that are just running. You know, one thing I really felt nervous about stepping into that possible role was that I was expected to be the expert in every single facet of that project. You know, I had to know the engineering, the soils, you know, report. the construction details, the nitty gritty for actually attaching a treehouse, or at least they wanted me to appear that way. But I was really learning all of this as I was going. And so I'm interested also, like, were you, was there a little bit of pressure on your end

to feel like an expert or to rapidly get to expert status while you were doing the show? To be honest, that's what they wanted. And that's not what they got. And thank God they didn't because flipper flop probably would have been the show it was. I mean, it's the most watched house flipping show in history. And I told them, I was like, I'm not an expert. I am literally learning as we go. And that's the excitement of the show.

Like, I am not an expert. I am showing, I am chasing the American dream. And that's the show we need to build. So at first, they wanted me to be an expert. And I was honest. And I said, I am not an expert. So let's just see what happened. So they worked with me.

And, you know, I think we created something really special. And nowadays, I would consider myself an expert at most. things. But like if it comes down to the details of construction, I am not an expert. I know nothing about construction. That's not something I want to learn. I'm more interested in being a real estate investor. That's a very similar. I love what you're saying here because I got started investing in real estate as a police officer. I was working full time as a cop and I'm buying rental properties. They were in other states because you don't really find cash filling properties in California. I would flip an occasional house, but that really wasn't my bread and butter. And I had the same

problem. Like, how do I do all the work of an investor who wants to do their due diligence right way while taking calls for service, driving the car around really fast, chasing after people, writing reports? So it forces you to actually kind of hone in on the systems that you're creating, cutting out the fluff, making sure you focus on the most important things. And I think it ultimately made me a better investor. It's why I ended up writing the book Long Distance Real Estate investing, because I kind of detail the systems of an investor. property as opposed to that like Brandon we talked about earlier he was flipping houses in his own backyard and so he would get sucked into let me just go change the door lock let me just go learn how to

fix a toilet let me just go it's always like oh i'll just go do the flooring myself it'll be easier faster i'll save money and he got stuck in the cycle where he wasn't growing versus me i'm notorious for i don't know how to change the door lock i tried one time to do it it took up seven hours of my day with four home depot trips i'm like never again whatever i could have paid a hand handyman four times what they wanted and still save money. Can you elaborate a little bit about if you really believe this is the better way to learn how to invest in real estate investing? Like honestly, man, like I said, I learned on that very first flip. Like I spent, I would go to Home Depot probably 10 times a day because I would forget this or I would forget that. And you got to

drive back and forth. You got to find part. How much time did we spend just driving a freaking home depot, man? I get mad just remembering. If I spent the same amount of time looking for houses that I did going through Home Depot, I probably would have flipped a lot more houses a lot faster. You know, so for me, like I'm not good with construction. So this is how I look at it. Okay. If I can hire someone to do it and it makes sense and I'm still profitable, I'm going to hire that person. because what is the most valuable thing when it comes to real estate investing, right?

What is the most valuable, more valuable than anything else? It's being able to source deals. So I learned very on after my very first transaction. If I become an expert at finding deals, the rest is going to fall into place. I can hire contractors. I can hire real estate agents. I can hire landscapers, I can hire escrow companies, I can hire people, but I couldn't hire someone to go out there and hunt for deals the way I was willing to do it. Which made me very valuable.

So I'm never going to go do $20 an hour work when I could be doing $5,000 an hour work. And that's the lesson I learned really early on. And I really learned it because of TV and TV forced me to delegate. Is there a moment where you realize that? Because it's obviously very easy for us in retrospect. We're like, no, our time is valuable. We're going to hire it out. But did you ever find yourself in the middle of a trade or doing anything where you're like, you know what? I'm done. I will never mud a wall again. Yeah, yeah. So this is funny. So on my very first transaction, you got to remember, my very first flip, this was after the 2007 crash where I sold my S500 Brabis, my BMW convertible, my escalate, like all my toys. So now I'm driving a Honda Civic. right so I would drive all over town to like sears outlets and I'm trying to like slam like range hoods into the back of the car it won't fit and I'm like man I can't I can't put the supplies from Home Depot in my Honda so I called my my business partner I said man we we got to get a truck and he's like we're not getting a truck I'm like what do you mean I need to go pick up all this stuff he's like

go hire someone to pick that up I'm like well no no we're going to save 50 bucks if I do it and and that's where he talked about opportunity cost and time. That was the first time I'd learned that. He's like, well, why are you going to go buy a truck so you can go to Sears to pick something up to go take it to a house when we can hire someone? My mindset was, I'm saving 50 bucks. What he taught me was, well, we could be losing thousands because I'm not actually working on what I'm good at. I was actually in a very similar situation about when I first bought my home, I was doing a lot of the remodeling myself and I decided to hire someone to help me remove a load bearing wall in my house. And,

that wall was a 16 foot span, or no, I think it was a 17 foot span. So I needed to buy a 20 foot, I want to say it was like a six by 10 or something. And the guy was like, well, if you want me to buy it, you know, it's going to be another 50 bucks. I have to go pick it up and everything. And I was so cheap. And I said, you know, I got it. And my wife and I drove a Subaru Forrester, which is a very tiny SUV. And I was like, we got this. We've done, we've done crazy things. really packed in stuff into cars a lot. So I go to Home Depot and I realized, well, this thing weighs like 600 pounds, first of all. So we have to get three or four Home Depot guys to help us put it on the top of the truck. And we line it up and basically there's five foot of lumber on

each side of the truck hanging off. And I was like, well, that's no big deal. I only live five minutes from here. And so my wife was like, man, I can't believe you're making, I'm part of this. And I was like, no, it's okay. It's going to be fine. And as luck would have it, I lived right by the forum, which is like a really big, it used to be a basketball arena, but now it's a concert hall. Concert let out right at that moment. So we are stuck in the middle of Los Angeles traffic for 30 minutes while I am trying not to maneuver my car too much one way or another because the piece of lumber is going up and down. And I was like, just seeing all the lawsuits that were appearing in front of me, I was like, oh, this is it.

This is how I lose everything. And that was the day I told myself, I will pay for delivery for the rest of my life. Yeah, and that's it. So that's where I learned about opportunity costs with that civic being at Sears outlet, trying to stove a hood into the back and it wouldn't fit. And then, like I said earlier, after my very first flip, I pulled it off. We made a profit. I worked my tail off.

But guess what? At the end, I had no other houses because instead of looking for houses, I was working on houses. So where's the time, what's the best place to spend your time? I don't care what anyone says. It's always going to be hunting. It's always going to be looking for deals, whether it's houses, whether it's apartment buildings, whether it's strip malls, whether it's self-storage. The most valuable thing any investor can do is source deals. Well, that's a great tip. And I know that you have a set of tips here for house flippers. I know you got five. So is there a way you can just run us through some of those for someone aspiring to get into this business?

Yeah, I mean, I'll go over a couple of tips and then you guys just ask me any questions you like. But, you know, people ask me, what's the first thing you do? I mean, the first thing you do, I mean, everybody knows this. Before you invest in anything, this is the tagline for my company homeschool where we teach people how to flip houses. Like, the tagline is this. Before you invest in anything, you have to invest in yourself. So before you go out there and get started, you got to get a mentor, join a program, read some books, jump on YouTube, start filling yourself with knowledge.

You have to invest in yourself. So that's obviously something very, very important. And once you start feeling comfortable, then you've got to get started. And for me, the first step is becoming an expert at finding deals, right? If you don't know how to find deals, you're never going to be in business. So finding deals is where I spent 95% of my time when I first got in this business. Nothing else. Like, I didn't know anything about construction.

I'm like, nothing. I spend 95% of the time learning how to find deals. And then once I found the deal, I was like, okay, the next step after you find it, well, you got to fund it. I had some business partners put in place where they had given me private money. And, you know, if you find deals, but if you don't have funding, you can't flip it. So a lot of times you have to wholesale it. So you find them first, then you got to fund them, and then you have to fix them.

Here's the thing. My first couple contractors, it was a nightmare. Like, everything went wrong. Nobody was working on the houses. Everything was behind schedule. I wanted to pull my hair out. But here's an interesting story on the fixing part. So I'm doing my very third flip. And I've been working on this thing for five months. It looked like it was been worked on for three weeks. There was a clip that had just been bought right around the corner. And there was this huge banner outside with the construction company's name. And I was like, okay, here's another flip. And I'm not kidding, guys. A few weeks later, I drove back by that house. the house was done. Like, the house was done. My house was still like nothing happening,

and this house was done in a matter of weeks. So guess what I did? I called that contractor. So you want to find them? Yeah, I called that contractor. Hey, I never say you've got to be the smartest guy or smartest person. I always say you go find smart people and you copy what they do. That's actually a very actionable thing because I would say,

probably 70% of the people that I ever found for any of my construction projects in L.A., I would follow dumpsters. Like, if I see dumpsters in my neighborhood, that's a really good sign for me because I can actually see the progress of a house. And if I like the work, I can go in and poach that stucco person or that drywall person. And it was really great. I mean, a lot of the people I still work with today are people that I actually saw working and working diligently. And yeah, that has really filled up my rolodex ever since. No, no, 100%. You know, like, one of the things like when I train people is like, you want to find a contractor,

wherever you live, jump on Zillow, look at every single house for sale, every single home that's sold them last six months, scroll through them one by one, look for ones that look like a flip. And it might even say completely remodeled. Call the real estate agent. Try to make friends with the agent. Say, hey, why don't you refer me the contractor that you, that did the flip on one, two, three, Street, if they help me with my house, maybe I can give you the listing. So I teach people not to just work with contractors. You want to work with contractors that do two things. One, they work with

investors, and two, they do volume, right? So I only want to work with experienced contractors. For my flips, I'm not going to go hire the custom kitchen guy. I'm not going to go hire the custom pool guy. I want to work with people that work with investors. Why is that specifically? Why is that a designation you're looking for in a contractor? Because they experience. They already know what to do. There's no learning curve. If I work with a contractor that's remodeled 800 flips,

do I really need to tell him what to do? I mean, at that point, they should be pretty experienced, right? So I look for people that have that experience. So as nice and professionals, the custom kitchen guy might be, their pricing is going to be nowhere near because they don't understand the difference. A flip is a vacant house. There's no homeowner there in the way. There's no moving furniture.

There's no covering things up. They're not picking every little item apart. So it's a different type of contractor. Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Does that type of contractor tend to like understand that as an investor, they can't necessarily mark up every aspect of that flip the way they would with just like a, you know, like a one-off homeowner? A hundred percent because that's their specialty.

They understand in order to work with investors, speed and price is important. And that's why I said we got to find experienced contractors. And to find like I used to go to Home Depot, like used to track garbage bins. I used to go to Home Depot in the mornings and watch what companies would come. What would their trucks look like? How would their employees act in public? How would they hold themselves professionally, right? I used to walk up to the pro desk. Hey, how's it going? Hey, I got a question like, what contractors

buy most materials here? Who do you think are the better contractors? Right? It's just asking questions. And like I said a minute ago, like you don't, you don't have to be the smartest. You don't have to know everything. You just need to find people that do know everything. And that's how you find success, or at least that's how I find success. I work with people that are specialty, specialists in the fields that they're in. That's great. So I said we got to invest in herself. We got to be an expert at finding deals. Spend the majority of the time there. Fund it different ways to get money. Fix it. That's the contractor. And then selling it, you know, selling it, price it right, professional photography. If staging is warranted, get it staged. But when it's time to sell, I treat it as

professional as possible. And the most important part about, well, two important things about selling the houses. One, price. But two, where. a lot of people drop the ball on, it's photography, spend $250,000, get professional photos, because those photos are going out to the entire world. And that's what those buyers are going to see. Yeah, this is something I hammer quite a bit, like with a lot of people that I teach. They want to take cell phone photos. I mean, people will come to me and say, hey, Rob, my Airbnb is not booking. I don't understand, like, why isn't it booking? Or like, this flip isn't selling. Why is it? I'm like, well, let me see. And I'm like, well, you took

your photos with an iPhone 3, you know, and a lot of people think, oh, well, it's, you know, it's got 14 megapixels. It's got the wide angle lens. Does that not work? And I'm like, no, you have to spend the money. I mean, good photography. Obviously, there's a range, but we spend anywhere from 250 to, I've spent up to $1,000 on photos. Obviously, that's not going to be all the time, but like, David and I had a luxury property that we bought in Scottsdale. And I really, I was like, let's spend money on these photos because it's a $3 million house. And I always say you don't want to put hub caps on a Ferrari, right? You want to spend the money and make sure that you're actually representing the property as accurately as possible. Have you ever been in a

situation where you sort of learned the hard way that bad photos didn't necessarily net out in the most profitable transaction? Fortunately for me, no, because before I was a real estate investor, I was a real estate agent. So I started as a real estate agent from 20 to 29, and I always knew the importance of marketing. So that's one thing I've always done is professional photos, whether it's a $100,000 condo or a $20 million house, they're getting professional photos because those photos on $100,000 condo might bring you an extra $10,000 bucks,

which could be an additional like 10% return, right? Just as something simple as the photos. Yeah, so I actually wanted to dive a little bit into the finding the deals because this is something that is perhaps the first thing you want to learn how to do super, super well. What is an example of finding a deal? Is it just going to the MLS and look,

on there or do you actually have a super secret secret sauce for for finding a deal? Yeah. I mean, for me, if you're shopping on the MLS, you know, you're shopping in a retail marketplace, you know, there are deals on the MLS. But man, it is, is it difficult to get them? And if you get them, it's not very often. So it's really hard to do multiple transactions. So I learned early on, I don't want to shop on the MLS. I want to work with off market deals. I want to work with distressed sellers. I want to work with. with motivated sellers. And that's really where my focus was.

So, you know, there's two ways to do it, right? One, if you have money, you can do marketing. Two, you don't have money. You're doing the work. So if you're someone that wants to get out there and do deals, you have no money, well, you got to be knocking on doors. You need to be making phone calls. You need to be sending text messages.

You need to be going to 50 open houses a weekend, talk to every single real estate agent, ask them for deals, get their business card, create relationships, follow them on social media. Every single time anyone you follow ever post anything on social media, you comment so they remember that you commented and you're always there. So when that deal does come six months from now, that real estate agent is going to remember, hey, Tarek, that guy, he's looking for off-market deals.

So it's just about, you know, I always compared to fishing when I'm teaching people. You know, you're going to jump on a boat. Do you want to throw one line off the back of the boat and sit there? Or do you want 30 lines surrounding the boat? What's going to bring you more fish? It's the 30 lines. So the old school way, go out there, hit the street, find deals. And if you have money for marketing, there's different things I do within my company,

Targ buys houses. We do digital marketing. We have TV commercials running. We have radio ads. And we're just always out there. And, you know, we spend quite a bit of money on that. All right. That is awesome as far as how important a contractor is, the importance of photos.

I'll second that. I'd say in today's day and age, because people don't realize there's no realtors or sellers that have a secret list of buyers that no one else knows about. Like, that's the way real estate worked 40 years ago. I'll put it in a newspaper. I'll put it in a magazine. Everyone sees everything now. Zillow, Realtor, Trulia, all of it.

It's like online dating. You have to have a picture that someone's like, I want to see that house. Most of the houses I've been buying are literally, I see ugly pictures. They're dark. Sometimes agents load them in sideways. It's just terrible. and I know no one's looking at that house. Those are the ones that I actually like to go after.

So that's a very good tip. What other tips do you have as far as what house flippers should be aware of that you learn the hard way? Oh, be aware of this. Really, really hard. The only difference between a successful real estate investor and an unsuccessful real estate investor is the successful one kept going when they wanted to quit. Okay? I wanted to quit so many times.

I remember thinking, there's no way in hell this is going to work. You're telling me I can pick up a phone, call strangers, and they're going to sell me their house under market. I'm like, there's no way this is going to work. But I did it anyways. And guess what happened? It worked. The problem is most people, they get frustrated. Most people, they get defeated.

Most people, they can't endure the pain because as you two know, you've been through it. Is it painful? Mm-hmm. Is it frustrating? Mm-hmm. It is, right? And that's where you just got to dig deep, believe in yourself, believe in what you're doing, and keep your eye on the ball. And if you believe and you keep taking action, you keep working every single day, eventually, it all starts to click.

I'd like to think I'm closer to the end of my, I'm at the end. I'm at the point of my journey where I kind of have the laugh sigh when something goes wrong and my partner's like, bro, you are not going to believe this. I go, yeah, I believe it. That's my answer to everything is I'm like, of course, of course. And I at least am now like, okay, you know, because I've tried to remove myself from the actual day to day and more do the investor thing like you're talking about, where it's like not how, but who's going to address this, it's a lot easier to move on from the situation. If I know, if I can really just as quickly as I can realize,

I'm not the one that's actually going to be fixing this roof caving in. I just have to get in contact with the contractors that's going to do it, you know? Exactly. And while they're doing that roof, you know what you're going to do? You're going to go find another house to flip. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals or LLC held property.

These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG. They specialize exclusively in real estate investors, understanding portfolios, risk at scale, and cash flow protection. One claim can erase years of returns. If you own a rental property, don't assume you're covered. Have NREG review your insurance with someone who gets investing at NREG.com slash BP pod.

That's n-R-E-I-G.com slash BPPod. If you own a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies are built for your type of property. And with holiday bookings, chilly weather, and higher guest turnover, having the right coverage is more important than ever. Steadily offers insurance designed specifically for short-term rentals, covering property damage, liability, lost rental income, and even unexpected issues like bedbugs. Steadily works exclusively with real estate investors. So they understand the details that make short-term rentals unique and they build coverage to match it. A quick review

of your rates and coverage every year can help you protect your property and your cash flow. Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance. Steadily, rental property insurance for the modern investor. People love to call real estate passive income, which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy. Busy finding deals, busy managing teams, busy worrying they pick the wrong market. Rent to retirement flips that model. They help investors buy turnkey new construction homes, often 10% below market value in top

rental markets across the country. Their local teams handle the build. the property management and the details, so you don't have to. In some cases, investors even receive 50 to 75% of their down payment back at closing, and there are interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've been trusted partners with BiggerPockets for over a decade, and if you want to learn more, visit BiggerPockets.com slash retirement. Tax season reminder for all the real estate investors listening.

If you own rental properties, short-term rentals, commercial buildings, basically anything that's not your primary residence, you need to know about cost segregation. It's an IRS compliance strategy that lets you accelerate depreciation on your properties, which means you're paying less in taxes this year and keeping more cash in your pocket for your next deal. Cost segregation guys is the go-to firm, having done over 12,000 of these studies with $500 million in total depreciation identified. Hit to Costsegregationguise.com slash BP to get a free proposal and see your potential tax savings. All right. So, Tarak, what about knowing a market? How important is it for the investor to know the

market that they're in? And what lessons have you learned regarding not knowing a market you're trying to flip or buy in? It's very important to know the market. So I buy houses at this point in my career all over the country. And when you know the market, like you don't have, I mean, you don't have to spend five years studying it. Spend a couple days, right? How is the population growth? How is the real estate market doing? How is that local? economy, right? What is the absorption rate? How many homes are for sale? How many homes are pending? Right? So you don't have to spend years. Like literally, you can just spend a day or two researching that market. And then once you understand what's happening in that market, then you can make the decision

to jump in the market. An example of this, if I want to go, let's just call any, so a market somewhere in this country. And I'm like, okay, I want to buy houses here. If I look that people are leaving, the economy is struggling and for every 20 homes for sale only one home is selling that's a bad sign that means our supply is really high our demand is really low i'm not going to go buying that market now if i go to a market where population growth is growing there's no inventory demand is strong maybe there's one home for sale and five homes in escrow what does that mean that means there's no supply and there's a whole ton of demand. So that's the market I would go into. So that's how I do that's how I determine the markets. I do a little bit of research on the local economy and I check the

absorption rates. I check the supply and demand curve. So my partner I, we bought this house. It was years ago. We bought it in Texas. Long story short, it was in like some type of a plain flood zone of something we don't have in California. Anyways, thought we got a good deal. Listed this thing, didn't sell. And back then, we wouldn't lose money on houses. So it wasn't something I was used to. Like I wouldn't want to lose money on a house. Now it's okay. I understand. If I make money on nine, I lose on one. I average 10. I made money, right? But back then I didn't. So instead of just ripping off the band-aid, selling this house in Texas and losing like 20 grand, I put it on the market. I took it off

the market. I did more remodeling. It came back and then tried to sell it again. And then I got it stage. Long story short, I kept trying to make it possible to get the price. I wanted, but in the end, ended up selling out like an $80,000 loss. And if I would have just ripped off the band-aid at the beginning, it would have been a $20,000 loss. Wow. So even at your level, I mean, you're flipping a lot of homes. Do you still sort of factor this in? Like, if you're buying 10, one's going to lose money. Is it a numbers game for you? Or is your strategy, like, I'm not losing money at any cost because I've got the systems developed. I'm curious from someone is experience for you? How does that play out overall? That is just one of the best questions

you could have asked me. So here was my biggest mistake in my house flipping career from 2010 to 2019. I wasn't losing enough money on flips. Let me explain what that means. I was passing on way too many deals. The market was going up. So in my mind, if I wasn't for sure going to make a good profit, I was passing on the deals. And literally 90% of those deals I passed on, if I were to just bought them and fixed them up and flip them, I would have made a ton of money. I was too picky on the houses I wanted to flip. So now I tell myself, if I'm not losing money on a small percentage of houses, that means I'm not buying enough houses, which means I'm not taking enough risk. That's really cool. I don't think a lot of people are honest about that. I think

everyone, they're like, fail at, you know, I don't, I'm not going to fail at any cost, right? And I think that, you know, the big swings is where the profits come in, right? And so every so often, you got to take an L. But if you take enough big swings, then you're successful. I got to imagine it, it's a net positive. Yeah, yeah. And here's the thing, though, like, when you go into a deal, I know when it's going to be a home run. Like, when I lose on a deal, going into that deal, I already know there's a chance I'm going to lose money on this deal. It's not like I have a deal where I'm like, I'm going to make 300,000, and then I lose money. That doesn't happen. So when I do lose money on deals, going into that deal, I know it's a riskier deal, and I have to make the choice. Do I want to take the gamble or not?

Yeah, and I think that's good for people to hear because it's easy to tell people never lose money on a deal ever. And I would also say I want to get your opinion on this. There's probably a point in someone's career where that is good advice. You just, you got your first $80,000 saved up, and it's all the money you have to your name. You can't lose, especially in the beginning, but I'll often tell people, like, some people make the mistake of playing conservative their whole life. You kind of said, that's what you were doing, is you're just being too careful. I tend to be that way, too. Other people make the mistake of just going and buying five houses before they bought their first one and trying to flip five at one time. So I'll often say, you got to start slow. It should be really

boring. Once you start to anticipate what could go wrong or you get that feeling like you just had, yeah, I might lose money on this house. I can tell. That's the point where, it makes sense to ramp up your business. Do you agree that that's the right point in the model where it makes sense to go bigger and possibly lose money to make more in the end? 100 million percent. At the beginning, we are only buying good deals. Let me say that again. When you first get started, you never want to go into a deal where you might lose money, right? You need to be so confident in your first deals. But as you grow your brand, as you flip more houses, the only way to scale is by taking more risk.

But the question is, how do you offset that risk? Well, pretty simple. To offset your risk, you got to make sure you have a bunch of profitable flips that you know are home runs. And that's where that one in 10 comes in. Listen, if I crush nine houses and I lose 50 grand on one house, do I care? No, because you take the math total profit divided by 10, you get the, per profit average, still really good. Yeah, I would imagine you only care if you lose it on the, if the first flip is the loss and you're like, dang it. No, let's just say I'm new to house flipping

and I lose on my first flip. Now, that's going to be a big problem. You don't want to start taking risk until you build up your nest egg. I look at it like a pyramid. Like you want your foundation of that period. The majority of deals you're doing to be boring base hit, not a huge upside, not a huge downside. They're just solid moves. These like, for the buy and hold spaces, just be single family rentals in good areas where they're gonna slowly appreciate over time. And then when you've got a big base, you can start buying more, a little riskier.

It has a higher upside, but it also could have a higher downside, but it's in proportion to how many safe ones you have. Then at the top of the period, you got stuff like Rob and I bought that $3.5 million property in Scottsdale that's like a crown jewel, but that thing might be a year or two before it's profit. We don't know exactly how this is going to work out.

But it doesn't matter because we have enough other cash flowing assets that it's not going to break us and over the long term it'll be a great deal. So I think that that's really good advice that you're sharing with people. And it's something that you hear in other sales areas too. They tell real estate agents, if you're not getting turned down, you're not trying to take enough listings. You shouldn't be getting every single listing that you go for.

If every buyer you work with, you're putting them into contract, you're not working with enough buyers. Like there is a point where every great athlete doesn't score on every single shot. They're going to miss sometimes too, right? if you only shoot when you know you're going to make it, you're going to score two points every three games and you're not going to be in the league that long. Yeah, 100%. This all comes down to experience. So one thing I know that you're known for would be the actual design that you're putting

into the house. I know on the TV show, it would kind of be worked out where your partner is the one who's choosing the designs and you're kind of working on the numbers. But what advice do you have when it comes to people figuring out the area they're in and making sure that the materials that they're choosing are in vogue for that area. Sure. I'm just going to say this once. We are real estate investors. We are not designers. Do not spend all of your time designing houses because at the beginning, that's what I did. And it takes too much time. So here's what I like to do. Houses are different all around the country, right?

So if I'm flipping a house in North Carolina, what I do is I will run a mile circle around that house. I will look for the closest highest. price comp and then however that house is designed, that's typically the same style I'm going to do my house because someone else already proved that that design brings the highest price in that neighborhood. For example, if I'm in L.A., I'm not going to do a design I'm going to do here at the beach. I'm going to go look at the comparables in L.A. So what do similar properties that are selling at the highest price look like? That's the question you ask yourself.

So if I got a three bedroom, two bathroom, 1,200 square foot house, I'm going to look for the highest sold three bedroom, two bath, 1,200 square foot house and make my design similar to that and maybe even a little bit better. Oh, man, this is a hard one for me because I am wanting to step into this a little bit more. And I am such a design-oriented guy. Is there ever a moment that you've told yourself, you know, I want to be the design pioneer of this zip code and be that comp? Or is it just never really worth it to be the trip?

jailblazer in that in that capacity right well i'll give you an example of that like if i'm doing a flip in la that all the homes in the area i have a modern remodel i'm definitely not going to do a traditional home right because in l. people don't want a traditional home they want a modern remodel so what i do is i do we do our own spin or our own twist on on a modern remodel so when i say we choose a design style our house doesn't look like that house but it's the same theme right it could be modern it could be transitional. It could be traditional. So I still get involved in the designing of it with the theme. But I don't copy the exact look, but I copy the theme, if that makes sense. It does. And in today's market, the other thing that I see happening a lot is, you know, there seems, I'm not going to

call it greed. There just are a lot of people out there that are, they know the market. And thus, they aren't necessarily always pricing the homes reasonably. And they're like, I just want to make a big fat profit, even whether or not it appraises and I'm not going to take any contingencies. What are your thoughts around that sentiment and that attitude in the market right now? Well, they're going to get caught. I mean, if they're so fixed in their ways and they're not willing to be flexible, that's where you run into trouble. You know, you got to follow the market. If the market says you got to drop your price, you drop your price. If the market says you should take an offer, you should take an offer. Because all the signs are telling you what to do. And if you

you'll go against the signs, typically you're going to end up in trouble. Has there ever been a moment for you where something like this went wrong? I know you kind of talked about, you know, if you had ripped off the Band-Aid, but is there any other moment where you were like, dang it, I probably got a little ahead of myself on the price here. You know, it does happen, but I'm good at one thing. I'm good at just cutting my losses in life and moving on. So if I have a deal and it's sitting on the market, it's not selling, I don't cry about it, I don't complain about it.

I reduce the price. I reduce the price. I sell it. I get it off the books. I make a little less money. I go find another deal. to replace that lost income. Pushes a win, right? So even if you got to break even sometimes, it's, hey, you get your time back and you can get it into the next house. Absolutely. Like something

interesting right now. You know, my company, I think we have 70 flips going right now. And on a couple of them, we're losing some money, you know, 30, 40,000. It's okay because we bought them a few months ago. The interest rates have doubled and that's fine. So how do I get over the fact that on some of these houses I'm losing 30 to 40,000? Well, houses I'm locking up right now, some of them are showing a profit of two, three, four hundred thousand. So do I care if I lost 30,000 on this house, but I bought another house that made 300,000? No, not so much. As long as, as long as I don't stop, right? I'm always hunting for deals, regardless of the market. All right. That is fantastic advice, especially the last part about knowing the market. I'm seeing this right now. In today's

market, we're seeing a shift. And people like me, like you, like you, that are experiencing this, we pivot fast. We, like you said, you listen to the market. You go with the current. You don't try to fight the current. And the people I see getting hurt are the ones that are just stubbornly holding out, especially like in the luxury space where those price points are very sensitive to interest rate hikes. And they're like, no, no, no, my neighbor sold their house for $4 million. I'm not selling for three and a half. You're like, yeah, that was at a 2.5 interest rate. You're looking at a 7.5 interest rate. And it can, man, that undertow will just suck you in and beat you up if you don't adapt quick. So I really appreciate you sharing that information, especially from someone

respected in the game as you are tart. I'll sum up your points here. The first one we have is know your market. What is selling there? What is going on there? What is the inventory as far as the supply demand curve like you mentioned? Are you one of 20 houses for sale and there's two pending? Or are there 20 pending houses and there's only two other active homes that are for sale? That is not talked about enough in our space, but as an investor and agent myself, that is the first thing I look at every single time someone comes to me about selling their house. Then we have make sure you pay the right price. So make sure you know going into it what your numbers are going to be. And if you're doing that well, you should know there is a chance I could lose money, but you know if that's a risk that you're

willing to take or not. Next would be the contractor is one of the most important aspects in flipping. Look for an experienced contractor that knows the market, that knows flipping, that knows working with investors, that you can say, hey, tell me what you think we should do versus they're looking for you to be the one to call the shots. Number four was design with the area in mind. Don't be the person doing a house completely different than every other home that's selling. And the number five was don't be greedy. Sometimes it's easy to go after the numbers that you want when the market has shifted on you. And the market is going to win a hundred times out of a hundred.

You're not going to beat the market. So all right, we're going to move on to the next segment of our show. This is a new game we're going to be playing called Real or Reality, where Rob and I will have to guess facts about U-Tark and you will tell us who is right. The first guess, the statement. is Tark's wife has a tattoo saying, yes, sir, Mr. El Moussa. Rob, what say you? Oh, is this real or reality TV? I think I'm going to go. I think I'm going to go reality TV. All right, I'm going to go with real because I don't see how someone could have come up with something this crazy and

specific if it wasn't real. That's there's a genius. I went through that too. I was like, I don't know. This is too specific. It's as real as the tattoo on her. Oh, really, that's awesome. Okay. All right. David jumps out to a quick one-nothing lead. It's all right, Rob, hang in there. I feel like you get better as we go. Next statement. Did we want to set wagers on this, by the way? Did you want to bet on who wins this at the end? Yeah, whoever wins gets to do the intro for the show. How about that? All right. That's nice, low stakes. I was going to say whoever loses has to watch Morbius, but yours is way better. Rob and I have a standing joke about how like there's like how many things in the world are better

to do with your time than watching the movie Morbius that we were disappointed by. All right. Next statement. My biggest flip was for a million dollars. Real or reality, Rob? Hmm. I think I'm going to go real on that one. Are we saying the profit was a million dollars or are we saying the price point was? It can't be the price point. I think the profit, yeah, because I'm sure he sold a lot of million dollar plus home. Yeah. So, all right. I'm going to go. go with reality. I don't think that's true. I think he's done more. Dang. Wow. Way to have faith, Dave. So we got real or reality? I think it's for real. Yeah. It's for real. I've done seven figures on flip before. And now the tables have turned, or I guess they've turned halfway. We're

even now. I have one right now. Should be closing in a couple weeks. I think it's at about 1.15. Oh, so I was guessing that. I thought it was to be more than a million. I think the question was, have I got to a million. So I, yeah, I misunderstood that. But still, we'll give that to Rob because I think he needs it. I do need it. Pity point. All right. Next one's getting juicy here. Tarek's wife's show, she's on selling sunset, has better T-Ratings, TV ratings than his does. I'd just be real here. I'm not a beautiful woman selling $30 million houses. So I would say that's probably real. I was going to guess real. What were you going to guess, Rob? I think I was going to guess reality simply because the rating system is different. And so just from a technicality standpoint, there are no TV ratings for

her show. Yeah. Well, I do know this. So her show selling sunset is number two in the world for Netflix behind stranger things. Wow. So if that doesn't tell you how big her show is, I don't know what does. And I have an idea how big it is just because I'm a real estate agent. So I hear about this constantly. That's a very, very big show. I have an idea as well because my wife watches it and I am always watching it with her. by proxy. She's very fascinated by it. So she said, oh,

also she told me, this is probably the awkward time to bring this up, but she said congratulations. She's like, can you tell, can you tell me I said, congrats on the baby?

And I was like, I'll work it inorganically. Yeah, yeah. We just found out about six, seven weeks ago. We announced it a couple days. This weekend's the gender reveal. We're going to find out if it's a boy or girl,

so I'm excited. Nice. Congratulations. Congrats on that. Next statement here. Rob, real or reality. Tarek's mom helps him with his flips.

I think I'm going to go real just because I want it to be. That's very sweet. Yeah, I'm going to go real as well because you mentioned, I think in the beginning that your mom helped you with getting started, or at least I have that idea in my head. Are we close? That would be reality. Oh, no.

Here's what my mom has helped me with. She helped me with a few things like removing an oil stain from a driveway one. So maybe it is real. She helped me to remove an oil. Same from a drivery once. And then when I was first flipping out, I did use her as a private money lender, and I paid her her as an investor. So I never took money from her, but I showed her a way to increase her income.

And by the way, I never stopped investing her money. And we've paid off her houses, which is kind of exciting. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Well, I guess we're even on that. Does we both pick the same thing, right? Yeah. All right.

Next statement. Tark has literally flipped over a house while flipping houses. Okay, mechanics here, I got to imagine they're like, they're transporting the house and then it fell off the truck or like the crane came undone. I think I'm going to go reality on that. Yeah, I think I'm going to go reality on that. I want to say real. My brain tells me that there's no way this could happen.

So reality. And then the flip thing, like, that's a perfect thing to make up because of flipping. But there's something in my. brain that I might have saw an episode where they advertise on the commercial like a sideways house or something. And so I could completely be pulling this out of my butt. But I'm going to go with real just to switch from Rob so we don't end up in a tie. Okay. I might be a little confused on the question because flipped over a house. What was the question again? Well, it says I literally flipped a house over while flipping houses. Real and reality. If we're talking about the same thing.

I did buy a house. It was on last year's season. The foundation was messed up. I hired a company to fix the foundation. So what they did is they stabilized the foundation. But in the process of stabilizing the foundation, they literally like bent the house in half. So the whole house was bowing.

So I think it's real and reality. I think both win. That's good. I wonder if that's what I was thinking in my mind. That could have been it. Because of course they do like the cliffhanger thing. Like what's going to happen? And they probably make your face look like,

oh, the house is going to split in half. that's a pretty interesting thing to get into the show. All right, next statement. Tarek was so poor that he had to buy $5 foot longs and make two meals out of it for two years in a row. I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh at that. If that is true, I think I'm going to go. Rob makes a habit out of laughing at other people's poverty. Don't feel bad.

Well, shut up. All right, I think I want to go, because I think I'm going to go reality on that. It's a good story if not. All right. I'm going to shoot with Real because Tarak looks like he eats very healthy. So I can see like the eat fresh refresh thing going on. He also mentioned that he got started at a very young age when he wasn't doing super well. And I can tell as driven as you were, Tarek, if you were out there, constantly hustling, looking for stuff.

It probably wouldn't surprise me because I used to do the very same thing. I was like, all right, how can I spend $10 a day on food and like make that stretch as far as possible? So I'm going to shoot with real. It is 100% real. I would go, I'd get the $5.00. I would turn that into $2.50 meals. I would always eat the first one in the subway. And then I would get a water cup and I'd fill it up with 80% water.

And I would only steal about 20% of the lemonade just to get a little bit of a flavor. Right. That's funny. Just grab as many lemons as you could. Listen, I was honestly, you like, hey, can I have? 10 lemons and two sugar packets, please. I'm going to make my own lemonade. I used to try to sell them on making one foot long sandwich,

but making half of it turkey, half of it roast beef, but then they wouldn't give me the deal. Well, that's why I just was laughing at the premise that you have like, you're the Hall of Fame of Subway. Like, they know you, they know your story, that you've got your photos on the window when you walk in because you're like the star client. Yeah, they should know me.

I mean, I literally lived off of Subway. It's all I could afford. Awesome. All right, that is a very funny story. I think I ended up winning by one point barely. All right, Tark, this has been fantastic. We have held you hostage for long enough. We need to let you get back out there to flipping and flopping.

For the people who heard the show that loved it that wanted to know more about you, where can they find out more about you? You know, I'm pretty active on social media. And on Instagram, it's The Real Tarek El Moussa. And that shows everything about my life, everything about my shows, all the different companies we're working on. Most excited thing I'm working on right now is my new company. I just announced a TEM Capital. And listen, like I said earlier, I'm an expert at finding deals. That's what I've become a specialist in.

And I spent years doing that to find houses. And now I take that same skill set. And now I partner with operators around the country that show us the best deals in the marketplace. So if anyone's looking to partner with me on some real estate, we have some great opportunities. Right now I'm working on a self-storage in Surprise Arizona. I am so in love with the deal. And to get more information and partnering with me on real estate deals, you can go to TEM capital.co.

All right. Thank you for that. This has been a fantastic interview. Thank you very much for your time, Tark. We're going to let you get out of here. Hopefully we get to do this again. You got it. That's a lot of fun, guys.

Thank you. Awesome, man. Talk soon. All right. And that was our interview with Tarek El Moussa. Rob, what did you think? Man, that was really, really, really, really fun. And my wife has thrilled that I mentioned.

her in this. And then I said, I told her he said hi. And she's like, wait, for real? And I was like, yeah, it's real. Dreams come true, babe. And so that's it. Her bucket list is over. What about you, man? Yeah, Tarak is everyone's wife's favorite, isn't he? I don't have a wife, so I don't have to worry about that element myself. But I thought he could have just kept going. We could probably do five more episodes with him. He's got so much knowledge about real estate, entrepreneurship, the right attitude to make it happen. I love how he harped on, don't do everything yourself, right? Just focus on getting the next deal and work on leveraging stuff out from there. I think that's a great business plan no matter what your business is.

Yeah, for sure, man. I really wanted to dig in. We got to have them on. Let's have them back on to talk about the TV stuff because I think there's so much there to unpack too. As someone who has a small peek behind the curtain, but obviously not to his level. Clearly you're referring to me, right, with my House Hunter's episode and my CNN appearances. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's in the intro of your YouTube videos. Speaking of, where can people find you online, man? Check me out at David Green 24 on social media. And on YouTube, I'm David Green Real Estate, been making content there. How about you, Rob? You can find me on YouTube at Rob Built, R-O-B-U-I-L-T, on Instagram at Rob Built. And watch out for scammers. You'll find five or six

different accounts that mimic mine, but Rob Built is very clean and simple. All right. Any last words before we get out of here? Uh, no. Well, you did a great job today, by the way. I thought this is one of your better performances. Thank you. Man, you know, I just needed to hear that today. All right, this is David Green for Rob the one and only Abas Solo, signing on. 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. Copywriting is by Calico content. And editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.w.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own.

Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.