Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about a $400 flip that made them $10,000 in their reselling business.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - $400 To $10,000 In 1 Flip
Rob: What up, guys? On today's episode, we are talking about a $400 find, turned into a $10,000 flip.
Melissa: It's our biggest flip of the year so far, and we're gonna dive into it.
Rob: Woohoo.
Rob: All right guys. So today we are breaking down this last flip that we did.
Actually just flipped it last night. Yeah. We paid.
Melissa: Biggest sale of the year. It's nice you're sitting there and cha-ching that cha-ching sound is always nice.
Rob: Love it. Paid $400 for it and sold it for $10,000. So super excited to tell you guys a little bit about that, kind of the breakdown of it, how it all took place with this episode.
Melissa: And where, yeah, the item you found it on the road trip this summer. But you didn't list it right after the road trip. You probably listed it a month and a half. A month ago.
Rob: About a month ago. Yeah. So it took a month to sell. We paid $400 for it, picked it up on the road trip, brought it back, and got it listed. And so are you guys wondering? Okay, what is it? What is it, What is this item guys?
It is a turbo chef oven, one of those ovens that you go into, probably like
Melissa: Subway,
Rob: Starbucks, something like that that they put in real quick. It heats up stuff really, really quick. And yeah, you'd see 'em in commercial places like that. So retail on this item is over $20,000, like $20,000 $23,000, so killer, killer deal, somebody got an amazing deal.
We made some great money on it and super, super excited.
Melissa: So a lot of times people ask, well, how can you find it for so cheap? Why wouldn't the person just sell it for $10,000? And they totally could have, the person, I think there might have been going outta business cuz he, we ended up picking up two of 'em for $800.
And he had a third.
Rob: I should have bought the third.
Melissa: And, but you, you were outta cash and you were kind of, he was in a rush. So, we got two of them at the same time. And you just, you don't know people's situations. Yeah. He just needed him gone. You had offered him, $500 for one. Yeah. And then we. You had messaged him?
Rob: When we got there.
Yeah. Oh yeah. We were driving through a town. This is on the road trip. Yeah. So we were driving through the town and had to meet, it was a five hour trip to get there. We were going through there and then driving another two or three hours.
Melissa: We had to time it just right.
Yeah. So timing it just right. Was it? Well, when I got there I said, you're sure this works?
Rob: He says, if it doesn't, I have three more in there, bring it back and I'll do it. And I was like, that doesn't do me any good, I'm 2,000 miles away from home. Yeah. So I said, would you be interested in selling two? If I bought two of 'em, would you do 'em for $400 a piece? And he said, I'll go get it. So he went in and I loaded that one up and he went in and got the other one.
Got both of them, for $800. That was all the cash I had at the time. I wish I had some more. But like I said, we were driving through, met him at his place, and then took off. So we got two of 'em for $800.
Melissa: And I was just gonna add too, that, normally you wouldn't look for, something in a spot that we were just driving through, but we had been there already once and we had to like couple days before the way we, our road trip this summer was all like over, we get went places and then went back.
So we had to, the way we were going, ended up driving back through a city and you'd already had a conversation with him and then you said, okay, well we are already left, but we are coming back through in five days or whatever it was. Yeah. So that's how you had that conversation.
Rob: It worked out perfect because we picked it up, we got it back and listed it.
Like I said, probably. Weeks, it has been on eBay. Just sold it last night. But not bad for a $400 investment. I didn't have to buy anything else for it. All we had to pay was eBay fees out of that. So yeah, we'll get the breakdown of all the fees, but I did do the estimate for shipping today.
Gonna cost me $125 to ship. I love it. I absolutely love it. Not too bad at all, to be able to ship a $10,000 item for $125.
Melissa: Yeah. And it's not even that huge. Like, I mean, it's a, it's a bit for us, it's not that big. Yeah. For $10,000, I mean, it's not but a normal sized pallet.
Yeah, it's gonna go on a normal size pallet.
And so that's exciting. It's not like we were talking about this last night, it's not like the huge bus wash that you had to spend three days palleting up. Yeah. So this one shouldn't take.
Rob: This won't even take me an hour to throw it on a pallet, strap it down and get it ready to ship. So I love it. I love that.
And the best part is we still got another one to sell and then. Three days ago, two or three days ago, I picked up another one in my local town. I picked up one, for $150 that is the same. It's actually the step up from these, these are, turbo chefs. It's the I-3 model. This is the step up. So it's the I-5, I got that and $150 for the one that I picked up.
That one is not working, but it is still a newer unit that I'm gonna try to see if I can fix, if I can't fix. Still should be worth a couple thousand dollars for parts, for parts, maybe sell for parts or repair. Don't under overlook that if you're finding stuff that is not working. This guy was just ready to get rid of it.
He didn't know how to fix it, didn't know anything about it other than he plugged in and it didn't come on. So I'm gonna see what I can do. If I can get it fixed, awesome. It's gonna be an $8,000 to $10,000 flip. If I can't, I will actually sell it for probably parts for $2,000 or $3,000 and still a good return on $150 investment.
Melissa: You can't underestimate parts for sure. Yeah, because even just this week walking through our downtown or walking, down to our downtown area, there was a cooktop on the side of the road. Yep. And we picked it up. And you were looking at it. Even if it doesn't work, which you tested in, it does work, right?
Yep. Yep. But even if it didn't work, the knobs, you said, were at least $20 each.
Rob: The glass part of the top was not cracked.
Melissa: Yeah. It wasn't cracked. And that's what it usually breaks and people need to replace. And that was like $800 retail, right? Yep. 800 bucks for retail. So we could probably get $400 selling it for parts, just the glass top alone.
Rob: And then not to mention all the boards and components inside. We totally could probably, I would estimate probably $750 to a thousand dollars just in parts on this. A used cooktop, pulling it apart and selling it apart. So, we love this stuff. We absolutely love this stuff.
Melissa: And we also we're gonna talk about that, the three of the things that we've, you've listed and have sold are all appliances, and we have really kind of gone into this niche.
What were the other two things?
Rob: One was a double oven paid a hundred dollars for, sold it for $2,000. That one sold in less than 12 hours once I listed it. I love that.
Melissa: Which isn't typical, but it does happen. It's exciting when it happens.
Rob: And then the other one was a 48-inch cooktop, a gas cooktop. We got both of those at the same place for $200. I mean, a hundred dollars a piece. That one sold two weeks. It was on the market for two weeks. Sold it and it was local pickup. I was asking $2,000 for it. The guy wanted to pick it up, what did I sell? Was it $1,700?
$1,750.
So sold that one for $1,750. So all together, what is that? $1,350? $13,000. $13,050 is what off of these three appliances, that we picked up on the road trip, doubled our money on what we spent on the road trip. I already made all our money back and then some money on top of it.
And I still have another 10 items, appliances and other stuff like that, that I have not got them out and got them listed yet, just because we've been so busy with other stuff.
Melissa: Yeah. Like the summit that's going on this week, we've been having so much fun, and you, it's just like we're recording this right during the summit.
Rob: Yep.
Melissa: So, just a lot of, a lot of stuff going on, but it's been a lot of fun. We've learned from a lot of amazing speakers. But yeah, the.
Rob: You still can get in and get your ticket today for the summit if you've missed it. It's still going on, but you can absolutely, it's a free ticket to jump in and watch presentations for today.
Yeah, absolutely when this goes live, you wanna do that. Also put a link below the reseller summit.com. Jump in and do that.
Melissa: Yeah. But back to the appliances. A lot of times people ask us too that, well, if you, why can you get 'em for so cheap and then sell 'em for so much? It doesn't really make sense.
And that's something that one of was the one girl who was in, who we met up with, she asked us that. She's like, I don't understand. I can get these all day for like $50 to a hundred dollars. Is people why themselves? Yeah. Why? I don't understand. And people, they totally could. Yeah. But either they don't wanna mess with shipping.
They don't. Use eBay. They don't wanna use eBay. But those are the, that's the key factor really. Yeah. It's getting it from the local market into the national or global market maybe. We don't really sell these globally. We sell 'em nationally, but yeah, but getting more eyes on it, who might be looking for it.
And you're offering shipping.
Rob: So yeah, we'll go back to the oven. I mean the, cooktop we just pulled out of the, trash, that was yesterday, the day before. Yeah, walking do yesterday, the day before, but the guy was actually out and I went up to the guy and said, hey, is this thing working? He said, well, I pulled it out of the trash from this neighborhood a while back, and we pulled two of them out.
They're a house, I think. Yeah. We, we pulled two of them out from the house and the house next door who are getting kitchen, remodels. Oh yeah. He says the other one worked perfect. I never tried this one. So it might work. It might not work, but you're welcome to take it and try it if you want, but, so why did he do that versus throwing it on and selling it himself for a couple hundred bucks because it is, it's over a, it's a 36 inch, so it's a bigger one than the normal 30, 30 inch, cooktop, and it's beautiful. It's a ge it's not a no, like a a off brand. It's a GE profile. Super, super nice and expensive cooktop. But he didn't wanna mess with it.
It was sitting in a storage. He pulled it out, put on the side of the road, and that was it. He didn't wanna clean it, he didn't wanna do anything with it. So you don't know what reasons why people actually get rid of stuff, sell stuff for cheap. There's just so many reasons, so much going on that people don't wanna mess with it.
They just want it out of their garage. They want it outta their storage, whatever it is. Or it just came outta the kitchen and they don't know what to do with it. They'll put it out on the side of the road or sell it for $50, whatever it is. So you can find some amazing deals on appliances.
Melissa: Yeah. There people are. What was your stat on how many of?
Rob: 10 million kitchen renovations going on right now in the US a year 10 million. And if you multiply that by four, because of cooktop,
Melissa: Oh, each appliance.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. A refrigerator range. I mean, all these different appliances that come out of a kitchen and a remodel, think about that 40 million, opportunities that you have to be able to, and that's just one area at that. Kitchen renovation. Yeah. So you can find appliances and stuff all over the place. We're not even talking about kitchens.
Melissa: Restaurants.
Rob: Yeah. Restaurants and commercial kitchen to go outta business. Or, schools that upgrade every couple years and get rid of all of their working stuff. Guys, there's so many amazing places to find great deal on appliances.
Melissa: Yeah. So we've definitely, it's not, I mean, we, we'll never be like pin holed into one niche, but we do tend to pick up. Those are the most thing. You just got two cappuccino machines this week and last week I did like the, like you just kind of, you drift towards those because yeah, they make so much money and our whole goal of our business is to work less and still make more money.
Like we don't wanna be always working on our business or in our business. And you like to just have fun yeah, and relax too and go on vacation.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: If you can have those big flips.
Rob: The cool story about the other cap, the second cappuccino machine that we got, I was at the, where I bought the total, or sorry, Turbo chef, that I paid $150 for.
I bought a couple things from that guy because he had stuff in his warehouse that he was ready to liquidate. He had the same cappuccino machine that I bought. When was it last? Last week or a week, I think it was last week. Anyway, same cappuccino machine. All days are ready together at this point. Yeah, we're so busy with the summit.
So anyways, the cappuccino machine that I bought about a week ago, is one of the commercial ones. Sits on a countertop, has like cappuccino, latte, all these different options that you can do. You press a button it goes, has its own water supply. I bought this a couple, like a week ago, and then when I went and got the turbo chef from this guy, I saw another one sitting up on the top of his shelf, and I said, what are you gonna do with that?
And he goes, Oh, I'm just gonna scrap it. It's missing parts. I said, Well, would you sell it to me? He goes, yeah it's gotta be worth $15 or $20 and scrap. And I said, I'll give you $20 for it. It's an $8,000 to $10,000 cappuccino machine. The only thing that it's missing is the bins on top, which I already priced them out.
They're $60 a piece, so another $120. I can have the parts that I need for this. I have not hooked it up up yet to verify that it works, but it's the exact same one that I have so I can figure out how to get this one up and working. If I have to order parts, I can rob parts from the working one to the one that's not working until I figure out what I need and I'm able to make some money.
So that is another $20 investment that even parts alone, I should be able to make a couple thousand dollars. But if I get it up in working eight to $10,000 for a cappuccino machine that I just got, so amazing, amazing deal. And why did this guy get rid of it for $20? Cause he was gonna take it to the scrap yard and scrap it, and get that money for it.
So you don't know people's reasons. You can find some amazing deals out there if you're just looking.
Melissa: Would you list it without those things and list it for less, or you, so you have an option too, right?
Rob: I do, but the cool thing is I have one here and I have the bin, the bins from my other one so I can test it with what I have, make sure everything's working on it.
If I have to pull parts off, I have to do any of that. Plus the owner's manual on these units is very, very detailed. It's like 300 pages and it gives you step by step if something's not working, I can go through the owner's manual and say, hey, this is not working. It'll give me step by step what to do to see what the problem is.
So like I said, I'm gonna spend a little bit. It's worth it for me to spend a little bit of time, see if I can figure out how to fix it, if it is broken or what I need to order to get it up into a hundred percent. So I can sell it for eight to $10,000 because it is totally worth a little bit of my time to figure that out.
Melissa: Another point too to why this stuff can sell for so much, it's, we're selling still for half a retail, like it has to retail for a lot more than, like we're not selling it at new price. We're selling it, but we're getting it at such a good deal that it makes sense. Yeah. To sell it. Like, So if we break down the numbers from this last one, you paid $500 in eBay fees.
Rob: Yep. And you did look at it, these are rough numbers because we don't have it out, but I did see what eBay had already. What eBay already charged me for it.
Melissa: So it was around $500 for the ad fees to refer the promotion too, right?
Rob: I did. I promoted this at 5%. So eBay charged me roughly $540 for promotion. I looked at my total payout that they were paying me on this, it was nine, a little, almost $9,200 out of the $10,000.
So, I figured roughly on the, on the conservative side, $500 in eBay fees, $540 on promotion fees. I paid them the extra 5% for the promotion. I know it's gonna be $125 to ship because I already got the estimate, for shipping. And then I had $400 into the item itself. So what was our total cost?
Melissa: So that's about $1,550 ish?
Rob: Yeah. Around, say $1,500. $1,500 to make $10,000 sale, which we only had to go outta pocket $400 to make the $10,000.
Melissa: You're at $8,400 about profit.
Rob: $8,500 guys. And guess how much time I have into this thing? Just guess less than five hours total. I spent some time cleaning this. I really wanted to do a good job on this one to clean it and make it look like brand spanking new.
So I spent probably two or three hours on the cleaning portion of it. I didn't have to do that, but I think that's how I got more money for it, because I spent the time on cleaning it. But probably five hours into $8,500 profit. That is amazing.
Melissa: It probably took you more time to clean too, cuz you were videoing yourself.
Rob: Absolutely. And I, I try to do it for our course members. I try to give them the breakdown of what I use, what chemicals I'm using and that kind of stuff so other people can do the same thing.
Melissa: And we actually, we just put it into our appliance flipping course, which is now open this weekend.
Rob: While you're watching this. Opened up today or does open today?
Melissa: Yeah.
Rob: I'm not sure if it's open yet.
Melissa: It does open, yes.
Rob: Opens today. So guys, go check that out as well. If you wanna learn more about how to flip these high profit appliances, we've designated a whole course, Flipper University Appliance Edition, Appliance Flipping course. We've designated the whole course to teaching you everything you need to know about appliance flipping.
Melissa: Yeah. And it's really where we've niched down and it's really where the most money is. So, we're hoping to share it with you so you can make some of, even if you added one of those flips a month into your current reselling business. I mean, if you could make an extra two grand, five grand on one flip. Yeah. Like, that's pretty awesome.
Rob: So yeah, I mean, last month we made those, those two flips of the double oven.
Melissa: Oh yeah.
Rob: And the cooktop, both those were on the road trip, sold those, like I said, back to back one in 12 hours. One in two weeks. This month it was the, this one just sold. So yeah. Amazing, amazing potential with appliances, if you're willing to learn what you need to learn, get good. You can make a great side income or even full-time income just by sticking with appliances.
Melissa: Yeah, we definitely dive into all the ins and outs of shipping it because we know that's the biggest question.
We've really worked on that for the last six years. Have you been doing?
Rob: Honing in our skills.
Melissa: Our first freight shipment was six years ago cuz Brody was just born. So, Yeah. Crazy. It's been how. Wow. Time flies.
Rob: It does.
Melissa: But we'll put the link below if you wanna check it out. If you wanna add this to your business, it could definitely increase your income in your reselling skill quick. Applianceflippingcourse.com and, but we'll put the link below.
So you guys are awesome and we will catch you on the next episode.
Rob: Awesome.