Luxury at Scale: Flips Generate 6-Figure Returns

So welcome everyone to another class on 7 streams of passive income. And this is another asset class for you to be able to invest in passively. Remember, 7 streams of passive income. Now, if you're the type of investor that loves to actively do this type of investment, that's extraordinary. And if you're not and you just want to passively invest and get the benefits, Trevor is a who that knows how inside of this and is a part of our 7 Streams Investor Club. So all of this leads into us being able to show you how to create those 7 streams of passive income with us as an actual community. So again, met Trevor back in Florida, had to fly across the country to meet him. And again, he has done extraordinary things and super excited to have you teaching today on doing fix and flips.. And what I love about it is like you do it as a family, which is really cool, right? Like that's a super important piece to me about including the entire family. Because again, that's how changing legacies and generations forever. So without further ado, I'm going to have you go ahead and take over and show us all the amazing things.

Awesome. Thank you for that, Catherine. Let me go ahead and share my screen with you guys. And we're going to present on some fix and flip numbers today. Okay. Let me know when you can see my screen. We can see it and we see the slides.

Down the side.

Let me start the slideshow. Is that better?

That's perfect.

Awesome. All right. So as Catherine mentioned, my name is Trevor Hicks. I live in Orlando, Florida, and I'm going to be going over some of my past fix and flip projects. These are all very real numbers, real projects that I have already gone through, completed. So I'm happy to share all of the pros, cons, and all of the things in between. So we're going to be going over again some real fix and flip numbers today, budgets, surprises, all of that fun stuff. And I have a fun before and after video that I filmed actually of the last project and some others that I can, I I can share after as well. So get to it. So if you want to follow along, you want to fact-check me on these, please feel free. These are all real projects, like I said, so you can feel free to pull these Zillow listings up and you can track along some of these purchase prices to double-check me if you, if you so please. This first one is 37 Bassett Lane. This is in Palm Coast, Florida. This was when I first started my investor journey. I was actually not doing fix and flips at all. I was doing some private money lending, some EMD lending and things like that. And this one just happened to come across my desk. They said they don't need any money. They actually needed to sell the house. So I went through the negotiation process with them. I actually did a virtual walkthrough because this is about 90 minutes away from me and it was not where I thought I'd be flipping my first house in Palm Coast. And ultimately got it under contract and then tried to wholesale it and found my partner who we flipped it together with. So, and most all of these that you'll hear me talking about, I did it with this same partner. We actually purchased this property back at the end of 2024 in about, I believe it was September, end of September, for $225,000. We did go through title, obviously had to go through closing costs, title fees, and insurance was about $6,500. For this first one, our acquisition method, actually we had a private money lender that served as our main funding source. She funded 90% of the purchase price, which was $225,000. So she funded a little bit under, excuse me, a little bit over $200,000. And then we had to go out and we found gap financing for the other little bit, as well as the closing costs and some of those things. So we gap financed $30,000 and our point origination, you'll see was on there as well. We paid the points on the backend. Again, with PML, we were able to get a little bit more creative and not need as much capital up front. And days on the market, of course it was zero. It was actually found off market. It was not listed at all, which is where I like most of my deals because we don't have to fight with other people making offers or lowballing or anything like that. We just see the property and present the numbers as it were. Hey, this is what I would do. This is my scope of work. Here's what I need to buy it at to make a profit. And I'm very transparent with all my numbers. Like, this is what it is. This is what our goal is to make on this, but obviously I'm doing 3, 4, 5 months worth of work. I think we can all argue we deserve to make some profit at the end. And we are sometimes that easy solution for a homeowner or an agent who's having trouble selling a listing. They don't want to list it. It's in bad shape. They inherit it. They don't want to fly across the country to deal with it. They don't want to clean up after themselves. Maybe they've lived in this house, quarters for 30 years and then they passed away. Family doesn't want to step foot. That's where we come in as fix and flippers as a, as a very viable solution. We're willing to do some of the dirty work that others won't. This general one was actually in pretty decent shape. It was a situation where the family had lived in this house for about 15 years and the kids were moving out and the mom and dad were actually getting a divorce. So the mom wanted to sell it, wanted to get out of it, wanted to move on. It needed next to nothing as far as livable. However, we could have fully updated some things. We could have updated and opened up the kitchen. We could have updated the bathrooms, but really again, they weren't in need of much of anything except for a new cleanup of pretty much everything inside, some trash out. We did end up replacing the AC. We didn't end up doing full interior and exterior paint just to make it pop and shine a little bit. We ended up replacing the pool pump and doing a deep cleaning there. Some minor electrical updates. And like I mentioned, trash out and we staged it so it looked a little bit nicer. Our projected ARV at the end of this, what we comped it at was about $350,000. We think we could have gotten to about $375,000 if we had updated it. But again, when we did the cost comparison for the time and increased rehab budget, it really wouldn't have made much sense. We wouldn't have made any more. We actually might've made a little bit less. So that was our goal on this one. We were projected to make about $50,000. $250,000 at the end of it all after paying back private money capital points, our gap financing, all of the title fees twice, and all of the closing costs twice. So a lot of people, when they first look at this, they might say, you bought it for $225,000, you plan to sell it for $350,000, and your rehab budget's only $16,000. Walk me through how you're only going to make that much. Obviously there's holding costs that go into it. Money is not free. We didn't borrow that money for free. We had to pay points on it. Of course we had to pay monthly interest on it. But the beauty of these and the way I like to do most of my flips is I like to finance either with hard money or private money for at least 90% of the purchase in all the rehab. And then I like to go find gap financing to do the rest so that I'm truly not using any of my own money. I do use my own credit a lot of times to float some of the rehab budget until we're able to get those reimbursed on draws. That's not how I did it on this one. I actually put it all on credit and then paid it off after we closed. So just getting creative and doing different ways, keeping our own cash out of it. And we might make a little bit more in profit if we didn't use private money or we didn't use gap financing. However, having that breathing room and being able to do multiple projects at a time, $30,000 is the smallest we've gap financed. So it's a lot easier to do multiple projects at a time if you're able to get gap financing. But the key to it is also buying the property at the right price at a steep enough discount that if something were to happen, if I could fire sale this property without doing any rehab and still make all of my lenders whole. If I can't do that, I don't ever sign on a deal. I don't want to get to the end of the project and not be able to pay my lenders back and then ultimately lose money. So that's a big thing when I'm underwriting properties. What really happened on this one? What actually, what actually happened once we got into it? So we were delayed closing because we were scheduled to close on a Friday, or excuse me, on a Thursday, and there was scheduled to be a hurricane over the weekend. So they actually delayed our closing. Insurance would not file for us until the hurricane, the impending hurricane had passed. So they actually made us wait to close on Monday, make sure there was no damage. It came out, they made sure, and then they were able to insure that, and then we closed. So what we also found out over that weekend was with heavy rain, the pool that was in the backyard tended to flood and There was a very narrow gap from the pool deck to the back sunroom where it was very easy to get water intrusion in. We found that out that time. And then right after we closed, about 2 weeks later, another hurricane came. Beauty of living in Florida on the coast. And we actually had to put pool pumps, 2 separate pool pumps to pump the water out into the yard to keep it from overflowing. We did have a little bit of minor water damage. We did some remediation. So that was the biggest thing I'd say we had to overcome in this. Incurred a little bit more rehab costs. So instead of $16,000, we actually incurred $19,000. We actually took a little bit longer. Now this project, if I got this project today, I would say it would be list ready in a minimum, or excuse me, a maximum of 2 to 4 weeks. Really just interior and exterior paint shouldn't take more than a week with pressure washing, painting, touch up that thing. Our AC was a day, maybe 2 days, and then trash out. We did a lot of that on our own in the deep cleaning. So like I said, 2 to 4 weeks is very reasonable. It actually took us almost a full 2 months to get on the market because of the delays, because of the flooding, because of the hurricanes. But it was on the market for, I believe, a total of 2 days. We found, we listed it and it was sold under contract within 2 days at full price at $350,000. So our holding costs, by the time we closed, we were at 3 months. We were just paying utilities. We paid that PML cost back at the very end, which actually that PML was a minimum of 6 months at 12% interest. So we paid them back. We paid our 3% seller concessions. Paid all of our closing costs. You can see some of the number rundown there. Our lender interest, that $12,250 was again, our PML. And then the $33,000 was the gap lender's initial, as well as their extra they had to be paid back. And our net profits at the end was $44,000. I love these because when I look at my personal ROI, it's infinite. I didn't put any money into the deal. Yes, I leveraged some of my credit, but that sat there for a month and then was paid back off. So it really didn't incur anything there. And so total timeline from start to close. Was about 3 months. Sadly, I do not have a ton of before and after. It's not a huge transformation of this one. This is my first ever property and my partner up there handled a lot of the things. I handled the financing. I found the deal. Big takeaway for this was budget more than you think. Always. We didn't put in any contingency. We thought it was very clean and dry. Even with a small project like this, always put in a contingency window because as soon as you do something, say we opened it up, maybe there was mold in the, the AC unit that had leaked over into drywall. So now we're doing drywall replacement. We're doing some remediation.. It can happen fast. So always budget for that. Okay, so property number 2, this is number 1 Blakeshire Place. This was a very interesting deal called Innovation, one of our earlier deals in 2025. This property was actually brought to us by an agent. My favorite, right? You make good relationship with agents and they keep coming back because you're an investor. They make money when you buy a house or when they sell a house. So if I buy from them and I sell with them, they double dip and then I keep coming back. Whereas I'm not a retail buyer, I'm not buying one house every 7, 8, 9, 10 years. So we've made a couple of good relationships with a couple of amazing agents. This one came from an agent that actually was an expired listing. A lady had inherited this house from her aunt who passed away. This woman moved down from South Carolina, Hilton Head, South Carolina, had a brand new house up there. So she wasn't super happy, but she came down here. She wanted to handle the estate. And then she got in there and realized it needed a lot of renovation. Well, she inherited a house. It was fully paid off. So she thought, well, I'm going to dump some money into this. I'm going to renovate it and we'll sell it for more. Because she was actually going to sell it and give the proceeds back to the rest of the family, to the aunt's kids, because she had inherited it. So long story, she wanted to renovate it to get more profit out of it so she could give back more to the family. So actually very nice, amazing seller. We built a good rapport with. Well, when our agent brought it to us, I said my cash price would probably be around $210,000. I knew that the renovation budget, we still needed to put $35,000 to $40,000 into it. And when I buy it on hard money, I close on it. Remember, I'm going to incur closing costs twice. I'm going to incur seller commissions twice. All of those things I've got to factor that in. And my building costs for doing the project. Again, the financing costs, all of those things. So my cash offer was, I believe, $205,000 or $210,000 was what I told her we could go up to. She wanted $245,000. I said, okay, I can't give you $245,000 cash. The only way I can give you $245,000 was to get creative and do something called a novation. So she didn't know what that meant. We were still learning at the time. We had never done one before this. However, I'd had a few investors who had told us about it. So we walked through it with an attorney, with a real estate attorney, and basically said we were going to take ownership of the property via power of attorney. We were going to have the ability to come in, renovate the rest of the property, which it still needed a fence around the entire— it was a beautiful, huge corner lot, but it needed some privacy. So we put up a big white vinyl privacy fence. We ended up needing to finish both the full master bathroom remodel, kitchen tiling, everything. We still needed to put a bathtub in the guest bathroom, and then we needed flooring throughout. So there was still a good amount of work to be done. She had burnt a lot of money on the renovation because she hired Nextdoor neighbor that really wasn't equipped to do some of the work. It took a lot longer. She got screwed over on buying like this $25,000 AC unit, which had like this really cool UV filter, but 3x overpaid for the unit in this house. It wasn't a massive house. So we were the solution. We said, I'll give you $245,000. However, you're going to give me 90 days to do the renovation and a maximum of 90 days to list it and sell it. So 6 months. If you give us 6 months, we will come in, we'll provide the funding to finish the renovation. And then at the end, we're going to list it with our own realtor. We'll pay the commissions, we'll pay the closing costs, and at the end you'll walk away with $245,000 net. And she was like, okay, I need to be convinced. So we walked through it again with the real estate attorney, had them draw up the purchase and sale agreement, a novation agreement, and a power of attorney. Walked through it and we actually went under contract with her, with title. So title held onto the contract while we were doing the renovation. And boom, we started renovation in about 34 days to the day we were done. We had the fence put in. We had the flooring fixed. We had the master bath, guest bath fixed. We actually ended up updating some electric in the both bathrooms and we had to end up finishing the front entryway. So we budgeted for $35,000 worth of rehab, projected ARV was $350,000, and projected net profit was $40,000. So what actually happened with this? Again, we hit some issues. We did have to do more demo to that front tile entryway to more modernly update it and make the flooring fit flush. So we ended up doing some manual labor with that to try and keep the cost down. We had to do some more electrical upgrades, which we did not know about when we first got into it. And then again, hit seller objections with the Novation, selling her on it. But in the end, everybody won. We leveraged our own labor, like I mentioned, and we also went through a lawyer to give the seller a little bit more peace of mind. That was a huge win. And it was something we got to explore with, right? Something I've never gone through before. But again, getting the right whos that know how, we figured it out and were able to do this really well. So Total acquisition at the end, we paid $245,000. Remember, there were no financing costs for this, although we did borrow rehab costs. I actually borrowed $40,000 for this to have for holding costs, to have for some, for the rehab costs. And then at the end of it all, we sold it for $350,000. We had it listed on the market, I believe for about a week and a half. This one went pretty quickly as well. But 4 months from start to close. By the time we were able to start the discussion, start the rehab, took about a month. We listed it, we sold it. So there were some extra holding in there as well. Just again, for the seller objection and going there, I factored that into the 4 months from start to close. Our net profit at the end was $33,500, but again, we didn't put in any of our own money into this again. So infinite return on this one. So big takeaway for this, get creative with your acquisition when the seller wants a higher price and a smaller amount of renovation needed. Get a little creative. So last and final property, and we'll give you some before and afters. This is my favorite as far as before and afters, because we did a major overhaul of this Recently just sold this. So you can look this up as well. 1634 Wind Willow Road in Orlando. It's right down the street from me. This one came from a lead, actually from an next-door neighbor who knew what I did, because I talk about what I do as far as buying houses, renovating houses. And she knew the homeowner was getting ready to sell, got us in contact with the homeowner. I just placed an agreement with an agent, which at this point I was like, oh man, I wanted to go direct to seller. But since then, this agent has actually brought us another house. So again, Another perfect condition where I have good relationship with the agent. They think of us when they want to sell a house, they come to us and we negotiate. So originally he told us that the seller wanted around $400,000. It is a good neighborhood. I knew that this house would go for a minimum of $550,000, even closer up to $600,000, depending on how well we did some of the finishes and what we did. So I was like, okay, we're not too far out of the ballpark. Said, can we meet you over there? Can we walk through it? We did a walkthrough with my partner. We walked him through everything that we would do. It needed— it's an older house. I believe it was a 1982 house, 1981 house. And it was pretty much all original. Original flooring, original drop ceiling, kitchen, very closed off, very separated, segregated. The master bath was old. It looked like they had tried to remodel it and there was actually still spacers in the tile. The ba— the bathroom actually had a slider in it that opened as soon as you walked outta the shower, the slider opened to the backyard. So as soon as you step outta the shower nice and naked, you're staring at the next door neighbors behind you. So we knew we had to do something with that. We were going to block that wall in. So it was a very large renovation budget. And I would say, you'll see in a minute that we actually still undershot it. So I did the scope of work on this one and I missed big time on a couple of things. And that was the AC as well as the windows for my rehab budgets there. So you can see a little bit there, our scope of work, full gut, remove the flooring, knock out interior load-bearing walls, full renovation of the kitchen, remove the drop ceiling. We ended up having to do some electrical work in there. All new windows, full master and guest bathroom renovation, new tiling, toilets, vanities, significant backyard landscaping. Significant. We had a large oak tree that actually hid a kid's playset, swing set, and a trampoline, all that were hiding from us when we closed. We didn't even know any of that was back behind this tree because it was— the tree had grown over so much it was touching the ground and it was raining when we walked it, so we didn't go much out into the backyard. Now, other than to see it was massive, but once we cleaned the tree up and we got all that out of there, we actually opened up about another half of the yard that really you couldn't even tell was there before. So that was a big, another big expense. So I originally made an offer at $340,000 and he was very shocked that it was significantly under what they were hoping for at $400,000. I walked them through why. I also got the selling agent on my side. I said, your guy's going to pay you, I'll pay you, and I'll pay you more than what he was going to pay you, which he was only going to pay him 1.5%. I offered him 2%. And then I also offered to have him relisted. So immediately got some, I got some oomph with the agent knowing that he was now going to be able to make commission on both sides. And he was really interested to see the renovation process. And ultimately we built a really good relationship. So bought that one off market. As I mentioned before, we like to buy with hard money. So for this, it was hard money funded 90% of that $345,700, and then they funded 100% of the rehab, but they hold that rehab budget back until you actually do the rehab. You've shown them via photos that you've done the work and then they reimburse you for it. So you're increasing the value of the property. They'll loan you a little bit more. And then we filled that gap with a gap lender. We borrowed $70,000 from a gap lender, and then we paid 2 points also on the— Projected ARV, we were conservative at $560,000. We were projected to make about $57,000 at the end of this project. What actually happened? So I'm going to play you the before and after. This is a drone shot of what it looked like before. You can see these big, huge crepe myrtles. You can see this big hedge bush here. You can see some of the older stone on the front here as well. These were all boxed in with these old rotting plywood around these big, huge windows. You can't even really tell that there's 2 windows over here. There's 3 windows here and there's 2 windows here. They're also all floor-to-ceiling windows. And then this after, you can see we cleaned up significantly this front hedge out here. We got new windows, we painted and made it pop. So you can see the difference from the drone video before and after. We repainted the exterior garage. We actually didn't end up replacing it. We just repainted it and cleaned it up though. Before and after video there. So we did do a full gut on the inside and I can show you some videos as well of that. But some of the issues we hit, we hit quite a few on this. We went way over budget. We actually ended up spending $106,700, so almost $29,000 over our budget. Our AC unit was one of the biggest things. The main unit was actually upstairs in the attic, and to get it down through the rafters, we actually had to rip through some of those. We had to rip through some new drywall. We re-drywalled the ceiling in the, in the kitchen multiple times. The electrical panel actually had the wires run under the rafters, the load-bearing walls, into the drop ceiling, and then back up again. So once we ripped out the drop ceiling and we went to drywall, the problem was, is the electrical wires were still under them. So we physically had to take all the wires out of the electrical box, rerun them. So essentially I got charged for a rewiring of an electrical panel, whereas all we were really doing before was just some minor electrical work. So increased in value. Our window permit took significantly longer. Because we had some issues. We thought we could pull the permit. We found out we didn't. We needed a full GC. Window costs and the timeline of that went up. So fabrication timeline and the delivery of those, that was the main thing that was holding us up. The windows were almost the last thing to be done on this, right before paint. So we had longer holding costs. We had more rehab budget, but we ultimately sold it for about $10,000 more than what we, what we thought. We ended up selling it for $570,000, but you'll see our net drop, net profit drop over $22,000. And that's again, part of the increased rehab budget, the increased holding costs and things like that too. So still made a profit at the end of the day, which was good, but our 6 months start to close was a little longer than we were wanting. We were trying to, trying to keep that under 5 and our listing went a little longer than expected as well. We got a lot of lowball offers at first. We didn't go with them. That was, that was some of the ways we worked with that house. Near and dear to my heart, because it's so close. We did a lot lot of work on that ourselves. But biggest thing from that, again, takeaway: scope of work. Accurate scope of work is huge. So getting licensed, insured contractors or subcontractors in there before you start the project to give you quotes and having them sign on those quotes before, saying, okay, hey, you say you can do this for $30,000, great, let's sign on the dotted line. If something comes up, I have to approve it. If something goes over, I have to approve it. Not, oh, we said $30,000 and now it's $40,000. That's a big thing too. But also factoring in a contingency budget. Things are going to go over. You set a budget for $30,000, it may be $35,000. If you don't have a contingency budget, you may be freaking out. But now I put at least $5,000 to $10,000 in the contingency budget on every project to allow us to work with a contractor. Again, factor that into there, or a project manager, somebody that's going to be there managing the boots on the ground for you every day, unless you have extensive construction knowledge, which I do not. I'm a healthcare professional. So we always factor that in and it's well worth your time. Contractors managing it, project manager, somebody with construction experience. Well worth your time. They will be there more than you have to be there. They will keep the guys in line and make sure that things are happening in the right way. So ever since this project, it's exactly what we've done. So it's my big takeaways there. And then key takeaways across all 3 deals. Like we just mentioned, always factor in a contingency budget. I plan for 10 to 15%, not a question of when you go over. So then you have it already factored in. Relationships save deals. What I would say is from a city contact standpoint, now I know people at the city that I'm going to reach out to and expedite the process. But also inspectors, lenders, contractors. Those are huge. We've got a crew sitting, waiting to go now. People that I've worked with on a couple jobs in a row, and we know what we're going to get, what pricing we're going to get, speed, cash, all of those things help. So if I have lender relationships as well that are ready to go, I tell an agent I can close in 2 weeks, I'm going to close in 2 weeks. I'll have my quotes beforehand. I'll have my crews ready. I'll have the lender ready, title company, everything's set up.

Boom.

Everything's ready to go. The other big takeaways is vet your contractors ruthlessly. Another big one we talked about, and Catherine mentioned before, is licensed, insured, and bonded contractors so that if and when things happen, that you're not just getting hung out to dry, that if they make a mistake, they're licensed and insured, they can come back and fix it. Check their references, check some of their recent work, require lien waivers, never pay for stuff that's not done. That's a big one I learned too. Don't pay for it until it's done. Pay for the labor after. And then ultimately underwrite conservatively is another big one. Your biggest rehab is not going to be your biggest ROI on your projects. You saw on that, those first two, I may actually made more money on ones that really didn't need much because I was able to quickly get the rehab done and get it listed and then move on from the project versus this other one took me 4 to 5 months just to get the renovation done. If the market drastically drops in that time and you didn't underwrite conservatively, you could be left holding the bag at the end of it. So definitely something to to consider. Thank you guys. Any questions on any of these?

No, I don't have any questions, but I just thank you. Like, I think you just really talked about some things we need to like think about as you're doing it. And sometimes when you're seeing things like flips and you think about HGTV and you're like, this is going to be this glorious experience, and it can be good. It's just some things you have to, like you said, like not paying before they finish the work and all of that. But I also think what I would also encourage is people also think, oh, you have to have all this money to do flips. And it just feels like every single, like the ones you did, it was just very creative how you did it so that like anyone can step into this.

I've done one with my own money and a hard money lender, and that was actually our least profitable deal of all. Wow. So I do, and when I'm using other people's money, I'm even more careful than when I'm using mine. Of course.

Exactly.

I want to make sure I've looked at it. My partner's looked at it. 3 other people have looked at it.

Our hard money signed off.

To make sure again we get into this and it's, and it's a good deal. So I agree with you.

That makes sense. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. It's been awesome.

You bet.

And I also think the great thing is if you want to learn more about this, first you could also check out Trevor on all social medias, Facebook and all of that, and Instagram. But also, like, we're coming together to get together to help others who want to become involved in projects like this. And so that is a great opportunity coming up. We're going to be sharing more about the 7 streams, learning more about really building wealth, like one stream at a time. So I'm really excited about that.

This is just one of those streams you'll be learning about if you're coming into the 7 Streams Investors Club. So I'm really excited, not only to learn more from all of you and all the other people that are going to be in there, but also to teach inside of that club. People can join because they're going to be learning from all of us as well as obviously Catherine and Tommy are the main things here, but we are excited to participate and give back as well.

Tommy, was there anything you wanted to say? I see you popping in and out. Maybe not. All right.

Well, no, I was trying to— we're out, we're out looking for, looking at the luxury property right now. So we, I've been listening in one ear and talking with, talking with some folks in the app. I wish I could get camera to—

it's okay, so we can see it.

It's not—

here we go. Oh, there you go.

Oh nice, I've seen, I've seen the post on this one. Really big houses, private road, so not necessarily looking at different properties. The next one I build, so here, take a look at this one. So it's coming, it's coming in and out a little bit. Oh, there we go. You're breaking up in and out, Tommy. We can't hear you very well.

We see a house, but it's like behind a cactus and— oh, there. But I think we're losing them. They're coming in and out. Thank you guys for letting us see a little bit of those beautiful houses in Arizona. And just thank you, Trevor, for sharing with us. It was great for you to be here. You taught us a lot about Airbnb. Airbnbs and all of that. So thank you for joining us, and thank you everyone for joining us. And if you're interested in learning more, we'll be putting out more information so you can sign up for just an overview session of all that we're creating. So thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

All right.

Go to my7streams.org to learn how you can join the club.