Rob and Melissa Stephenson, of Flea Market Flipper, talk about what they picked up for $120 and flipped for $3,000.
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$120 Turned Into $3,000 In Just 2 Weeks
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about a $120 investment turned into $3,000. Alright, so today, guys, we're talking about this flip that we just landed last night that we paid $120 for and sold it for $3,000. $3,000 in just less than I believe it was less than two weeks.
Melissa: Yeah, you got it in this summer in the end of July, but you listed it two weeks ago. So yeah, so it's sold and we're gonna talk about it. We're kind of recap the summer. It's been a little while since we've been on here, but the kids are back in school. We're back to routine, which is nice to have. It's nice to be off.
We love the time off. We love kind of no schedules, but then it's also nice to get back to the schedule.
Rob: Absolutely. So, and we miss you guys. We miss being able to give you guys some great information about what's going on in the flipping world, what's going on in our lives as well for what we're flipping and what we're doing.
So, yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun to dive back into all this great stuff and hopefully give you guys some great information. Some great action steps to actually get your business off the ground or get it going.
Melissa: Yeah. So if you're worried, if we were going anywhere, we're not going anywhere.
Just sometimes you need to take a couple little breaks and summer is just kind of crazy, right? We still went, we didn't do, normally for the last four summers, we've gone on a road trip across the country to where we go. We're really, the main goal is to see different sites that we haven't seen, different national parks, different state parks, different parts of the country.
Cause our country, it just changes so much when you drive from like one side, there's so many different things to see. So we love it. We love showing the kids. We didn't do that this summer. We had a couple of smaller trips planned. And so, but we still found some stuff while we were on our smaller trips.
So we're going to dive into one of those flips and then kind of getting prepared for what does the fall look like.
Rob: So, yeah, exactly. So that one flip that turned $120. So we paid $120 for a oven, a range, that we actually were on a road trip and I saw it and I could make it happen.
It was like 10 minutes out of the way on our way back home, that I made it happen. I negotiated it, we went by, picked it up, got it for $120. A range and then we sold it on eBay for $3,000 plus an extra $400 for shipping on that.
Melissa: And this was a fun one because when I put like usually on social media, when we post something like we'll post, we found this and it should sell for this.
And then you always get the people like, oh, should sell for that. Won't sell for that. That's not going to sell. That's not going to sell. But. They usually, you're not usually just throwing out a random number. Like I think we even posted it should sell for around $2,500 and it sold for $3,000. So there you go.
It did sell and it didn't even take that long to sell because you, I mean, there's not a lot of competition on that one. It's a really nice range. Super nice. You just, you didn't have to clean it. It was a little dirty. So.
Rob: No, this one wasn't that dirty. It was pretty clean. Yeah. So this one was clean, but I will give you the strategy how we sold it.
This is a strategy that i've been using lately and a lot of people might have different strategies in different ways that they like to do stuff, but our strategy for selling this is I had it marked at $3,200, $3,1 99 And I like to get people interested at that price. And then wait for the watchers to come on the listing and I do not accept offers. I do not list my items with accepting offers.
I don't do that I let them have the buy it now price. And then as I get watchers on the listing, I check it every day, every other day, any watchers that come on the listings, I send them a specific offer. They will not tell me who the watchers are, but they will say, hey, you have two offers right now that you can send out for people that are watching this item.
And that's how we bring the business in. And I've done this multiple times recently, and I like to do it this way. So. I sent out offers, I think when I sent out offers yesterday, I had six watchers on there that had the potential of buying it for, I dropped $200 off. So I did it for $2,999.99 is what I did it for.
So just under three grand,
I sent the offers out and somebody took the offer up to save $200. And then they had to pay, like I said, three grand plus the an extra $400 for shipping. So that's kind of our strategy that I've been really doing well with in this world of eBay and the higher profit sells on eBay. That's kind of how I've been doing it and sticking out a little bit different than a lot of other resellers Because a lot of people will totally put hey, $3,199 and or best offer. Right off the bat, you're going to have people that are low balling you and sending you offers. And I feel like if they already know that you're not taking best offers and then they get an offer from you, it's like, wait a minute, I better jump on this. I don't have 48 hours to accept this offer.
So that's kind of our strategy. Try it out. If you're not doing that strategy, see if it will work for you, but it's been working pretty well for us.
Melissa: Yeah. So yeah, so that was a really nice sale. You actually had a, we'll, we'll dive through the month, at the end of the month. It's not quite there yet.
We'll get back to doing all the things that we love to do and help you guys, grow your business. But we had a $1,500 sale last week. That was, we did. It was a lot of something that you bought, right? It was the, the screens?
Rob: LED. So we bought LED screens with a lot of hardware that went with it. And I just listed a couple of the pieces of hardware separately.
And somebody reached out and said they needed 12 of them. And I have probably like 500 of them. They needed 12 of them and asked if I would do a deal and I said I'll ship them for free if you buy 12. It ended up being like just under $1,600. It cost me $100 to ship them, but $1,600 total in it and all the LEDs, all the hardware, everything that I bought all together.
And this is trailer loads of stuff that I ended up getting. I paid $2,000 for all of it and I just sold 12 of these small pieces of hardware for almost $1,600. So, killer, killer deal on that. We did that. But yeah, we'll recap the month and tell you guys, once we do the numbers on that kind of stuff.
But another thing that I will say is, yeah, we are in negotiation right now with two of my listings. So, the cool thing is, once the kids went back to school, I started getting messages like crazy. I started. Everything started picking back up, and I haven't even really started diving into my listings again.
Like, I'm trying to get back onto a routine.
Melissa: Well, people are back into, like, house projects, house, like, redoing stuff, because it's, for some people, back to school. Some people, you know, it's like kind of the, August is, in the gym, we used to see August, like, late August was the new, was another January. Like, people were like, okay, we're starting, we're starting fresh again.
And sometimes August, September was even better than January at the gym for people joining and people doing training, so. Yeah.
Rob: So I have two things in negotiation right now. $9,000 dishwasher and a $11,000 motor. So we'll see if that works out, but both of those I paid hardly anything. I think I paid $300, maybe $350 for the motor.
I'll have to look at my spreadsheet. The dishwasher, I want to say it was $200, maybe it was $400. No, I think it was $200 or $250. So, I'll have to check and see. But both of those are in negotiation right now. Almost 20K in two items. Hopefully, hopefully we'll be able to seal the deal on those.
But, like I said, just in case. Since the kids have gone back to school, it's been a really, really good month that we are actively seeing people reaching out, asking questions, doing this, and these items that we're selling are, are worth some money. So it's really, really cool.
Melissa: And I will say like now, okay, we're gearing up for the fall.
We're getting ready for this second half, I guess the almost fourth quarter. We're not quite there yet. For us, Q4 doesn't like we're not seasonal. So it doesn't really affect us as much as it does a lot of other sellers because Q4 usually is the biggest of the year. For us, it's not necessarily it's kind of more even all the fall year.
Yeah, but I asked Rob even just today I think I asked you this morning. What is your strategy now? Okay for the fall you're gonna like get ready get going again and, and the strategy comes back to getting stuff listed. Like, that was your answer. I'm gonna get stuff listed. Like, that, you, that's the bottleneck of you don't have stuff listed.
So, that's what you gotta do. And I know, like, people want, the secret and the shortcut and there are things that you can do to improve your listings too. Like there are things you can do but the biggest thing is get stuff listed. So I think if you need some encouragement to get stuff listed here you go. Go get your stuff listed because it can't make money if it's sitting in your death pile or money pile.
It's sitting there ready to make money.
Rob: That's it. Whatever you have, that's what you need to do. And if you don't have anything to list, go find some stuff, find some free stuff. I mean, I was just looking on marketplace right before this podcast, and I jumped on and I saw multiple items that people had listed for free that they just wanted somebody to come and pick up and worth probably over a thousand, $2,000.
One guy had like four of the mobility lifts that you put into the back of a hitch and it raises the the wheelchair up and down to to be able to drive different places with a wheelchair scooter Whatever it is and he had I think five of them and he said come and pick them up. They're they work. There's nothing wrong with them.
He yeah, but he was giving away for free right there. Some of those things are over a thousand dollars. So I think it's probably a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff just for free. So if you don't have anything to sell, go find some free stuff. If you don't have the money to invest, go find some free stuff, find some free stuff that you can actually get and then turn around and sell it on marketplace or listed on eBay.
If it's going to sell better on eBay and sell it on eBay, because there's so much stuff out there that you can really find some cool stuff.
Melissa: There's no shortage of items. Once you, you know, really get out there and look or start doing some of the stuff from your own house. Maybe a lot of times, even this time of year is a good time to declutter and maybe you haven't grown your eBay business to what you want or you haven't really started.
It's always the best to start with stuff that you have in your house because you're not going out anything for inventory. You already have it. You know, you can let it, if you're, we're going to donate it anyway, you can let it go for a little bit, you know, cheaper and then build up your feedback. Cause that is really the first goal is to build up that feedback.
So, well, we are, did you have anything else you wanted to add?
Rob: No, I was going to say this is a great segueway into telling you guys something new that we are doing. And you might be super, super excited about it. Yeah.
Melissa: We, something we did do this summer, we've still been working behind the scenes. We spend spending time with kids still doing our one on one coaching, still spending time, you know, doing some things behind the scenes.
And one thing we did recently do is a sourcing service where we, Rob actually goes into your area. This is something we only usually do for our one on one, coaching members, but you go into their area for one time, look and see what you can find. And the goal is, well, you find $2,000 to $5,000 worth of items in their area.
Rob: Typically it's way over $5,000.
Melissa: Typically it's more, but we're going with that. Two to $5,000. Yeah, that's our promise. So, we'll, we'll just link that in the show notes if that's something that you wanna check out and something that you're interested in, you can let us know. It's down there in the show notes.
Rob: But the cool thing is it's not just finding these items for you. It's actually showing you how I find the items, how I would negotiate the items, and then exactly what they will sell for what the active listings on our eBay. That you're competing with and then exactly what it will sell for. So this is not just, hey, here's the item.
It's giving you start to finish. I'm teaching you how to fish. So that's the real, real cool part about this service that we actually started doing. Got some great results from it. Had a lot of fun doing it. So if you are interested, like I said, Melissa will drop a, a link to the show notes. You guys can do the application or whatever to jump in there and see if it's a good fit for you.
Guys, like always, we love you guys. We have, it's so much fun bringing what we have to the table, showing you guys how to really succeed in this business.
Melissa: And hopefully open your mind to what is possible with some of these higher value flips.
Rob: Have a great day. Cannot wait to see you on the next episode.
Melissa: We're excited to be back.