There’s a growing epidemic in this country.
Scantily clad woman are on the loose – on billboards, TV, online and in the newspaper – promoting everything from lip balm to tiny foreign cars. I actually heard a radio spot last week with a voluptuous-sounding woman advertising tee times for a local golf course. “Join me for a threesome or foursome,” she said. Yesterday, I was flipping through the channels during the middle of the day and caught a condom ad. Trojan Man, Trojan Man.
Things have gotten so out of hand I find it increasingly uncomfortable to watch a live sporting event with my 9-year old daughter. Viagra has a commercial every 20 minutes. “Daddy, what is erectile dysfunction?” she asks. I tell her it’s a sickness that causes older men to get stuck, either with their large trucks in the mud or on sailboats in the middle of a lake.
Listen to the hit song Gangnam Style. The only line that isn’t in Korean is HEY, SEXY LADY! Clearly, sex sells. And singing about it, or medicating to get it back, sells even more.
Fixing and flipping houses is sexy now too. Okay, maybe not in the sexual sense, but in a macho, hair-on-your-chest sort of way. If you have cable tv services at home, you might have noticed variants of a fix and flip reality show that includes at least two business partners, a sledgehammer, lots of arguing, and a dramatic music bed playing in the background. And while the drama makes for great television, for those looking to gleam how-to information about rehabbing houses for a profit there’s a lot of important stuff the producers of these shows leave on the cutting room floor.
My business partner Manny Romero and I have flipped more than 80 houses since 2010. In the last three months we’ve rehabbed 15 properties. Not once in three years have we kicked in a door or yelled at each other for missing a deadline. Sure, we have an occasional snag, but for the most part things have gone relatively smoothly for us.
It’s all because of our systematic approach to acquiring, rehabbing and selling real estate. A very successful real estate investor in Phoenix introduced this strategy to me and he’s used it to flip over 1,000 houses since 2008. Let’s just say it works really well.
I call this plan Four Flippin’ Boxes and it breaks down the business into the following phases:
- Acquisition
- Rehab
- Sales
- Raising Capital
I’ve written about the Four Flippin’ Boxes concept in bits and pieces on my blog (flippingphoenixhouses.com) and on the popular real estate investment website BiggerPockets.com. However, until last month I’d never put all the material together in one place. Well, I’m grateful for the opportunity to post here today about the release of my new book Fixing and Flipping Real Estate: Strategies for the Post-Boom Era, available for pre-order now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The release date is December 12th.
This book contains every lesson, tip, strategy, success and failure I could remember ”“ from the beginning of my real estate investing career in 2002, to the crash in 2008, to the recovery that began in 2010. Unlike the reality TV shows I leaving nothing out. You get it all for around $14.
Now that’s what I call sexy.
” (a great read by the way). Needing a new book, I 
. I *think* next up will be 
— but who knows.
The Phoenix Real Estate Guy was started by Jay Thompson, and I have a little blogging problem... he liked to say...