Mark & Theresa talk with Spike TV’s ‘Flip Men’ Mike Baird and Doug Clark about real estate, family, and making money.
Mark: You are back inside MyFixitUpLife. Or should I say, My Flipped Over Life?
Theresa: Oh it’s not flipped over.
Mark: Sure it is.
Theresa: No, I think you probably want to flip our house but you can’t flip our house.
Mark: I bought this house originally to flip it.
Theresa: And then you fell in love.
Mark: And then I fell in love and it fell in love with me.
Theresa: You know what, I’ve never actually seen that story line happen for the Flip Men who we have on the line right now.
Mark: Yes we’re joined by Doug Clark and Mike Baird — the Flip Men from Spike TV. How you doing guys?
Flip Men: We’re doing really good, we’re great.
Theresa: Well I am really excited to talk to you guys because I have been catching your show, and my stomach turns watching you guys go and find a house and not know what you’re getting yourselves into.
Mark: How much Alka-Seltzer do you guys go through?
Flip Men: Yeah, as long as we’ve been doing it, we’re sometimes in the same boat. You know you think it would get old after a while but it absolutely does not.
Theresa: Yeah like Mark was saying, how much Alka-Seltzer do you go through or do you just have stomachs of steel now?
Flip Men: Ha Ha, we just have a propensity for disaster and literally though we know value and because of that we’re very, very comfortable, we build in the margins typically for a problem — and problems do happen, but compared to the boring way of buying real estate it’s kinda fun. It gets you up early in the morning and you never know what you are going to get that day.
Theresa: Well I can see why you guys have a TV show on Spike and that they renewed it and your new season is going to come out this summer on Spike TV. So are you filming right now?
Flip Men: No we’re not filming right now. We are really, really excited about the Season 2. We’re gonna be filming in just a couple of weeks. We’ll start mid-April and we’ll shoot for a couple of months and then we’re hoping to begin to air once again in July. But absolutely we have some neat stuff in store and hoping to top whatever we were able to deliver on Season 1.
Theresa: That is so cool.
Mark: But you know what is great about what you’re talking about? Is you have no idea what’s coming down the pike…cause you’re buying these houses unseen.
Flip Men: That’s the exciting part about it is you kick open that door — and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts for Doug and I personally — is you never know if you have Christmas morning staring at you or if you have a complete nightmare. And Spike tends to like the nightmares and we just have to deal with those just as well and get them back on the market.
Theresa:Now Mike, I read your bio and you have four kids and a wife.
Mike: That’s right I do.
Theresa: How does your wife deal with the whole thing? You have bought and sold 500 investment properties…like does she say ‘I don’t even want to hear about what you’re doing all day long’? Or is she excited about the whole thing too?
Mike: You know she’s pretty excited about it. Since I have been doing it for a while she kinda just rolls her eyes. There was one episode Season 1 where we pulled a skunk out of the vent, and for one reason or another I just forgot and didn’t tell her about it, so she’s sitting there watching the episode for the first time with me, live, and I’m pulling the skunk out of there and she’s like ‘Are you kidding me! You seriously found that and you never told me about it?’ And I’m like you just never asked so I didn’t tell you about it kind of thing. But every day is a little bit of a crazy adventure for sure.
Theresa: Oh my goodness. You know I would say to my husband if I saw something like that, I’d be like ‘ Honey, did it bite you? Do you need to get a shot?’
Mark: Ha yeah. Oh I forgot that I pulled a rodent out of a chimney.
Theresa: I’m sorry that wasn’t on my checklist of things to ask you.
Mike: Yeah it’s this big thing. Like honey how am I supposed to tell you, you never asked me? And I will say one other thing; she’s being really particular about what shoes I wear into the house. Like pretty much every shoe that I have now I’ll leave outside because she’s seen me now step on cockroaches and walk through some stuff that isn’t so pleasing. So she has gotten more particular in that regard the last couple of months thanks to the show.
Theresa: Oh that is really fun. Now Doug, I read that you’re a pilot too…are you still flying?
Doug: Yeah I actually was a commercial airline pilot for about ten years. And really my story is, prior to buying my first foreclosure with Mike, the only thing that I knew about real estate is that I used to get paid to fly over it. I mean I had no experience whatsoever, but I went down, I saw an auction for the first time, and I could not believe what went on every single day, and it just captured me. I had never seen anything that exciting and you know the nice thing about a foreclosure is it’s instantaneous. We wake up, we scout a hundred properties a day, and we try and buy one or two, but it’s immediate. There’s no waiting on things like contracts or things like that. So there are reasons we do it. But yeah I had no background whatsoever — I was just a lazy pilot.
Theresa: A lazy pilot.
Mark: Yeah lots of pilots are lazy — thanks for telling us that. Uh can you cancel my tickets to wherever the hell I’m going. Ha ha.
Theresa: Ha Ha. If you guys didn’t already make me nervous watching your show, I’m more nervous now.
Mark: There’s a seat and I’m on the edge of it.
Flip Men: We have that effect on people.
Mark: Oh that’s funny. So in addition to the business side of this — which I have questions about — is there like an adrenaline side to this too that keeps you going?
Mike: Absolutely. The auction itself in my opinion is an absolute drug. And sometimes you’re down in the Vegas casinos, you’re walking through the casinos at 3 in the morning and you’re sitting there watching somebody pull the lever over and over again and that’s exactly I feel like the disease that I have everyday, showing up for this auction and going I never know what’s gonna happen on this next property. Is there going to be a killer opening bid, or is this going to be an unbelievable clean, no touch, ideal that nobody else sees. But it’s that same type of somewhat addiction that you have for these deals and not only hunting them, but buying them, and then the challenge of trying to get it back on the market and make as much money as possible. So it’s absolutely an addictive drug, and I think Doug and I have it really, really bad.
Theresa: When you guys go on vacation — if you ever go on vacation, and you’re just walking around and doing whatever, and you see a house, have you ever seen a property while on vacation and wanted to go after it?
Flip Men: Ha Ha
Theresa: You’re both laughing.
Flip Men: That’s a really good question. I think we have. Literally I was in St. Thomas and every house that I was driving by I was thinking ‘How much value could I add to that? How cheap can I get that?’ Literally it is like that. When I go to Hawaii I’m like ‘What can I get that house for?’ We live, breathe, love real estate and honestly we believe in long term holding as well. We have tons and tons of rental properties. We believe that is an excellent path to building your own retirement. And we do flip to kinda stay in the business and give us the ability to pay for our living and to hold more properties but we breathe, eat, sleep real estate every single day.
Mark: Wow that’s funny. Now is it, and I don’t mean this to be a naïve question, and I don’t mean to be asking your secrets and stuff, but is there a specific business model that you guys have? You know neighborhood A you know you can only sell a house for whatever — 300,000 dollars, neighborhood B it’s only ever gonna sell for this. So you go in, you know where your basement is, you know where your roof is like business wise?
Flip Men: Yeah really good question. First of all, what we tell people in a philosophy that I think is the core of what we do, and what allows us to excel is we invest in our local area. We live in Salt Lake City, this is where we live, and this is where our families are. But I get people that call me and say ‘Hey I got this great deal in Timbuktu, or Vegas, or Phoenix, or San Diego,’ all these places and the reality is, the only way that we’re able to do what we do is because we understand value in our specific geographic which is in our case, Salt Lake County. Now we didn’t just start in the entire county because it’s not a huge county, you can get from one end to the other in 30 minutes. But what we did is we started with very, very specific small neighborhoods, we got to know the value so well there that when a deal came up, we moved quickly on it, we paid cash for it, we were able to exploit a lot of opportunity. As we began to grow, we kind of expanded our area, and now the entire county of Salt Lake is where we tend to do business in, and we do not typically go outside of that unless it’s some sort of crazy type deal. But the key is understanding value in your specific market, and then doing enough deals that you really understand it well enough. And that’s key. There are some auction properties that come up, and you’re sitting there and you’re literally buying sight unseen. However, you have done a property maybe 2 or 3 minutes away or a couple of blocks away so you have that point of reference to somewhat go off of, and that’s helpful, it’s not complete information by any means, but the incomplete information — that’s where the opportunity lies. When you can learn to exploit that, that’s when the real money’s made.
Mark: Now you must have, over the course of all these investments built up like an A team of people that you can call like if it’s doomsday. I think I saw this one where you had to kick in the basement window to get in because there were no keys, and you got in there and it was full of water.
Doug: Yeah that was an awful morning, and we do have an excellent team. We have done — the real number is close to a thousand properties in Salt Lake that we’ve flipped — and over that most of our team has been with us for about eight years and they are just people who are excellent and they know the product we need, they know the look we’re going for, and that has been the core — we built the right team. And the right contractors, you’ve probably seen our contractor on the show. So many people think our contractor is just an actress or something. She was with Mike before I was with Mike almost a decade ago. So she is our foreman, she runs all the crews, our team is fantastic. It’s just a turn key machine and we put a property in the front, it comes out the back pretty much the same model every single time, and it’s a very good way to make a business or a hobby, or to get an extra rental property. However someone wants to get started in real estate, you gotta get the right team around ya.
Theresa: Now we just have about a minute left but I want to know, in your personal lives, and in your own homes, has your whole drive for this business affected the way that you fix up your house in the way that you create spaces in your home? Taking this whole — I don’t know you’re like hunters, you’re like real estate hunters.
Mike: Ha Ha yeah it’s interesting that you bring that up because when my wife watches the show she’ll say ‘Honey that looked really good in that investment property you how come you don’t do that in our place? You know I really like that paint color.’ So it is fun to be able to kind of experiment and do a lot of creative and different things on some of these investment properties and then yes somewhat implement them into our primary residency. But the business is one thing, and that’s profitable but we always have these tools that we like to put in our back pocket and use on a personal level, and it certainly has been fun.
Theresa: That is so cool.
Mark: Well we have to put this in our back pocket cause we have to take a break. Check out Flip Men on Spike TV.
Check out the MyFixitUpLife talk show that features this interview with Spike TV’s Flip Men.
