Joe DownsCEO & Co-Founder, Belrose Storage Group. Founder, Storage Moguls.

Why I Quit Fixing and Flipping Houses

20 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this first-person account, the speaker describes his journey from the fix‑and‑flip side of real estate to a decision to leave that business model. He built a HomeVestors franchise that completed 40‑50 property flips per year, creating a high‑paying but high‑stress job that generated only short‑term capital gains and no lasting wealth. Feeling burnt out and unsustainable, he consulted a mentor who advised him to research commercial real‑estate investing, promising similar effort with far larger financial returns. The speaker took that advice as the catalyst for pivoting away from residential fix‑and‑flip toward commercial property investments.

Chapters

So I came from the fix and flip realtor world, as a lot of people do. We scaled that HomeVestors franchise up to 40 to 50 flips a year. But what I did was I created a very high-paying, high-stress job with no wealth. So fix and flip is all short-term capital gain, and it's extremely transactional and extremely stressful. Reaching out to my mentor at the time saying, hey man, this isn't sustainable. I'm burnt out at there's nothing here. So he told me, go research commercial real estate because it's the same amount of work with more commas and zeros. And that's what I did.