COUCH FLIPPING - The Best Side Hustle No One Talks About

what's going on everybody welcome to ryan pineda show where we talk all things money real estate and entrepreneurship and for today's video we are going to talk about a side hustle that any of you guys can do and i personally think it's the best side hustle that nobody talks about and no one does so stay tuned [Music] okay so before i tell you what exactly the side hustle is let me give you the backstory of how i figured this out back in 2013 my wife and i mindy had just gotten married in october and we moved into our first apartment together and at the time she was only 21 years old i was 24 we didn't have money so in order to furnish the apartment i ended up buying all the furniture on craigslist i was getting a couch here for 100 bucks a table there for 50 bucks i got our beds i got literally everything you can imagine all used i want to say we furnished the whole apartment for like a thousand dollars and me being an entrepreneur and a go-getter i knew that we had gotten great deals on everything i would never pay market value for anything whether it's used or not and in my mind when it was done i was thinking that we could probably resell it all for like three thousand dollars but obviously i wasn't gonna do that it was just a thought in my mind now at the time i was a struggling realtor not really making too much money so i actually decided to go and be a substitute teacher and i never talk about this because it was such a short period of time that i forget that i even did it but i ended up getting my substitute teacher's license and started substitute teaching at middle schools and high schools and elementary schools and i thought it was kind of cool because they would pay you anywhere from 90 to 120 bucks a day depending on if you worked at an at-risk school or a nicer school the nicer schools would pay less the at-risk schools would pay more and i did this for a couple of months and i thought it was a super cool job because i'm just sitting there for six hours making a hundred bucks not really doing anything it's super easy but as i was sitting there i did have a lot of time to reflect and think about what i wanted to do with my life i ended up reading a lot of books like rich dad poor dad but i also started thinking about ideas of how i could make more money for our young family and i kept coming back to this idea of we bought all this undervalued furniture and i could go sell it right now and make good money and as i thought about it more i said well what if i just found one good deal a day if i found one good deal a day i could make 200 bucks i could go buy a couch for 100 bucks and resell it for 300 pretty easily and the reason i knew this was because i had already bought it and i knew what they were going for on craigslist so i decided to test my theory i said hey if i can buy one good deal that takes me like an hour i don't have to sit in this classroom for six hours so i ended up testing my theory i bought one couch and i took it back to our apartment so i actually had this couch taking up like all the space in our apartment and i don't think mindy was too happy about that but i wanted to just test the theory i ended up putting it back for sale and a few days later we sold it and made 200 and that's when the light bulb went off i said dang like that was way easier to do than go sit in this classroom for six hours even though that's easy too this is way quicker and easier and it has the potential to make as much as i want so the minute i did my first sale i quit substitute teaching because i knew that this was the way to go and the thing to know about me is once i prove an idea i just go all in at it so i ended up buying a 1 500 truck off craigslist it was a 1998 gmc sierra and i'll never forget this this was the funniest thing on the ad he put that it had 99 000 miles and i looked at the odometer when i bought it and it looked like 99 000 miles as i was driving it a couple days later i noticed there looked like there was another number that was kind of like in view but not in view and sure enough i looked at it and it really had 199 000 miles so i ended up getting duped on this truck but that being said for 1500 i mean what do you expect right and at the end of the day that truck served its purpose and it allowed me to start picking up furniture and selling it so after i bought the truck i ended up getting a 10 by 30 storage unit that i could drive up to that was going to be my warehouse and my storefront and i was all in i was just buying everything i could that seemed undervalued it didn't matter if it was a couch it didn't matter if it was a table it didn't matter if it was an appliance i was buying anything i thought was undervalued i'd put it all in my storage i'd clean them up a little bit take pictures throw them back on craigslist and offer free delivery that was the key offering free delivery made people pay top dollar and doing this was successful i started to figure out what things really were worth i started to figure out what items were the best to use and the funny thing that happened was i was driving my truck so much more than i was driving a brand new car that i had at the time i had a 2014 mazda6 that was a beautiful car but because i was delivering stuff all the time and picking up stuff all the time i was driving the 1500 truck way more than that after a few months of proving it i decided to sell them both i ended up selling the truck for exactly what i paid for it so that was good and i ended up selling my new car for a loss it wasn't that bad of a loss maybe five thousand dollars but i knew i needed to get rid of both of them and get a truck that i could drive around every day so i ended up buying a truck on craigslist a 2004 toyota tundra with 90 000 miles and that was going to be my one car i was gonna use it for everything else i was doing and i was gonna use it for work and in fact we had the truck until recently when i bought my dad a new suburban and we sold it to one of our contractors so back to the story i've got a nice truck now i've scaled it up i've got multiple 10 by 30 storage units now because i'm buying so much inventory and i'm realizing what things i like selling what things i don't i realized real quick that appliances were not good they always broke they were super heavy people always complained about them so i pretty much stopped buying appliances the other thing i didn't like about appliances was i needed somebody else to help me load and unload them try getting a fridge up into your truck try getting a fridge out of your truck it's not easy so i stopped doing that because i wanted a business where i could do it by myself and i didn't need help i also realized that dining tables and things like that just didn't get that much money i might buy one for 50 bucks but i can only sell it for 100-150 it wasn't worth all the time and headache to do that i needed somebody to help me lift the dining table so that was out of the question what i realized as i did it was that couches were easily the best things you could buy there was a ton of supply of them you could get a lot of good deals you could load it by yourself and you might be thinking yourself there's no way you could load it by yourself how well you tip one end up onto the truck then you go and pick up the back end and lift it up and push it into the truck and that's it it's super simple to do it by yourself it may seem like it's hard but it's not and the thing with couches is once you take off all the cushions and the type of couches we're buying are pretty cheap so they're pretty lightweight they're not what you think so i just learned that i needed to specialize in couches and i learned real quick what couches get the most money sectionals by far outperformed everything else leather sold better than microfiber i learned that if you could remove the covers and just wash them they look brand new if the covers couldn't be removed because they were attached those were a pain in the butt because there's really no way to clean it other than getting a professional so i became really niche in my couch searches on what i wanted i was basically going after neutral colored sectionals that had covers that could be removed so that we could just throw them in the washer and put them back on those were the best sellers by far i could pick them up for a hundred to two hundred dollars and sell them for two to three hundred dollars more than what i paid for them every single time without fail i learned that a couch by itself like your typical love seat or three seater couch is not worth it you could get it for 50 bucks but it's still only going to get 100 to 150 so i ignored those i would occasionally buy a couch loveseat combo because that could make good money but nothing beat the sectional at one point i had up to four 10 by 30 storage units that you could just drive up to and it was super cool because whenever somebody would come look at one couch if they didn't like it i could go sell them on another couch i'd be like hey here's my units i'll show you around take a look maybe there's something else you like and so a lot of times a potential customer that came for one couch ended up buying another so this was honestly my first experience at running a legit business and i was doing it by myself and i got to the point where i was making on average eight thousand dollars net profit every month this was after paying my gas the storage expense and that was it and the overhead on it was not very much because we're buying these couches for a hundred to two hundred dollars i might have like two thousand dollars sitting out there at a time but when i go to sell it all i'm gonna make six to seven thousand dollars so i loved the couch business i'll tell you if i didn't find real estate i'd have probably kept doing it because it was an easy way to make six figures i had months where we made twelve thousand dollars man i remember during christmas time when everybody was selling their stuff because they're gonna buy a new one for black friday or whatever i made twelve thousand dollars one december because we bought so much inventory and sold so much so i know that the business can be quite lucrative i ended up doing this for about three years before i learned how to finally flip houses and i actually was doing it when i first started flipping houses because that was my main source of income so that's why i always tell people you don't have to give up your day job right away i didn't flipping couches was my day job after about six months and once i proved i could flip houses i quit doing it because of opportunity cost i knew that it was taking more time away from me finding the big deals that can make me a lot more and also during that time as well i ended up hiring my friend to help me with those couches while i was transitioning into real estate the way that we'd worked that was i would find the couches on craigslist i'd negotiate i'd send him to go pick him up and pay for him he'd bring him back to the warehouse strip them down get him cleaned up i would re-list them on craigslist and let him know when he needs to go deliver it to another house i'd pay him 50 bucks every time he picked one up 50 bucks every time he brought one back and we were making 200 bucks a couch so he'd basically make 100 and i would make 100. so that was my first experience at actually delegating and hiring out for my business so i learned a lot of good principles from this business and i will say that it has made me such a better negotiator and salesman i definitely have bought and sold over a thousand items on craigslist during this period when you get into a thousand negotiations no matter what the price is you start learning people's tendencies you learn how to negotiate you learn how to make low offers i know that that business was a way to set me up for these bigger businesses so i'm super grateful that i got to experience all that and i forgot the best part about all that was i was learning real estate investing while i was doing that because i was on the road delivering and picking up couches so much i would listen to real estate podcasts like bigger pockets and i did that for about three hours a day so i was consuming all this real estate content i was listening to all these audio books and working on the long-term future for myself while making an active income so i absolutely loved couch flipping i just realized at one point that i'd pretty much reached the max of what i could do with it and it was time to do something bigger now with all that being said what do you need to do if you want to start couch flipping or flip anything on craigslist number one make sure you pick what you want to sell you could try multiple things at once just like i did it doesn't have to be couches maybe you're an expert at cell phones or comic books or collectibles whatever it is you could flip anything on craigslist and i know garyvee has made this somewhat popular now buying stuff at garage sales and reselling them and baseball cards he wasn't talking about that stuff when i was doing this this was me just hustling getting it done so at the end of the day i don't care what you end up selling just pick something that you know the value of and that there's actually a good supply of that you can buy because it doesn't do you any good to only go after comic books but there's never any comic books for sale the reason i love couches is there's always couches for sale there's always furniture for sale so pick something that people are actually selling daily second thing research the value figure out what the market value for things is i realized that couches sell for three to four hundred bucks on average on craigslist so i knew i needed to buy them for one to two hundred dollars as long as i could make 200 bucks i was gonna make my spread and that was how i looked at it if i couldn't make at least 200 bucks on a deal i wasn't gonna do it now that's not to say that you need to do that maybe you end up specializing in smaller items maybe you're gonna do volume and make 20 bucks an item 50 bucks an item that's cool you can do that but it wasn't for me i would rather have the bigger margins and less volume listing all these items and talking all these people is a pain in the butt and it takes the same amount of time to do all that to make 20 bucks versus making 200 bucks so i would pick a high margin item third thing is make sure it's convenient for both the seller and the buyer so here's what i mean by that when i would see a good deal on a couch i would say hey i will pick it up right now okay i'm offering convenience to the seller so now they're going to sell it to me at a discount this is the same thing we do with flipping houses we make it super convenient for them so that we can get a discount on the house same principle on these couches i'm going to make it convenient for you i'm going to pick it up right now it's out of your hair you don't got to worry about it anymore so i'd pick up the couch bring it back to my warehouse then i would start the convenience process for the buyer so i would take off all the cushion covers wash them get them clean put them back on take really nice pictures and then here's the key i would offer free delivery the free delivery is what got them every single time when you offer free delivery and you offer a nice looking couch they are going to buy it for whatever you're selling it for honestly 90 of the time they never even haggled me on price they just bought it which is odd because i try to haggle everything i buy yet they never haggled on it because they just thought it was a good deal it was convenient they're willing to pay that so you have to clean it up and offer free delivery and that's really the basics of making money buying and selling things a few other quick tips i would add is when you're looking for deals search multiple keywords that it could be so when i was searching for couches i would search couch sofa sectional those type of things when i go to sell it i would put the same keywords beautiful brown sectional couch microfiber i'm just trying to hit all these keywords that people might be searching for that way my listing gets found and honestly it's that easy to run a business on craigslist if you have smaller items you could do it from your home if you're okay with everyone coming to your home if you have big items and you need storage maybe you start out in your garage first then if the business grows you go get a storage unit storage units are really cheap guys i would also suggest that you get a drive up storage unit so you could easily drop off stuff and put it right back in if you got to walk through the maze of the storage unit it's totally not worth it so keep that in mind pay a little more just to have that convenience as you can tell i'm all about convenience on all aspects that is going to make your business much smoother i think that pretty much covers everything i've had a lot of questions about this business because a lot of people know my story and honestly i love it because it's a business that literally anyone can do so if you got value out of this video do me a big favor make sure you go and hit that like button if you haven't already make sure you hit the subscribe button and the little bell notification that way you get updated every time i release a video and make sure you follow me on all the socials i'm active on there daily and as always get out there go hustle go make some money and i appreciate you for watching take care

Channel: Ryan Pineda

Views: 832,903

Keywords: real estate, house flipper, cash flow, financial freedom, entrepreneur, future flipper, house flipping, rental properties, passive income, real estate investor, real estate investing, wholesaling real estate, ryan pineda, graham stephan, meet kevin, max maxwell, bigger pockets, garyvee, grant cardone, Side hustle ideas, side hustles for extra money, side hustles, side hustles 2020, side hustle fortnite, side hustle ideas to make money, how to make money online

Id: KZGn2wWfWNM

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020