633: 9 $1000+ Flips: Uncovering Profitable Resale Items

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1:19But it's another thing entirely to be able to do that consistently with big, big profit items. What's up? What's up? Nick over here. Welcome to the side hustle show because there is profit everywhere. if you know where to look. Now, this is the show that helps you uncover those profitable ideas by shining the light on how other people are getting it done. And one of my all-time favorite profit finders is back in the studio for the first time since 2018, if you can believe that. Makes a full time living from part-time work, buy low and sell it high from fleamarketflipper.com and Flipper University, Rob Stephenson.

1:50Welcome back to the Side Hustle Show. What's up, Nick? I'm so excited to be back. We always love chatting with you. So thank you so much for inviting us back to talk to you today. I am pumped as well. We're going three rounds with Rob today, counting down some of his best slash most profitable slash most memorable flips with the criteria that they made over$1 ,000 in profit. It's not about who sells the most stuff. It's about selling the right stuff with high margins. This is something that I can be about. Round two is donate a business idea and stick around for the triple threat in round three.

2:20This is a marketing tactic that's working right now for Rob or his students in Flipper University. This is a new or new to him tool that him and his business partner, Melissa, are loving right now and his favorite book from the last 12 months. I want to start off with these thousand dollar flips because you guys consistently are able to find these items where on the one hand, it's like, why would anybody let it go? If it was really worth that much, why would somebody be letting it go for way less than that? But you do it over and over again. I think we first recorded in 2014, 2015. You've been doing it long before then and ever since.

2:50So maybe kick us off with these like ambulance stretchers. This was last year's big win. Absolutely. And a lot of people think that these scores that we find are once in a blue moon or a needle in a haystack. And we have done it time and time again. Last year, our totals were$92 ,000 for the whole year with only 46 items. We only sold 46 items the whole year, averaged us a little over$2 ,000. But the important part is the profit. And we were over$73 ,000 in profit on that$92 ,000 gross. So, so, so cool. We're able to do it year in, year out. And we just keep doing it back to back to back. So you can too.

3:21Anybody can do it when you know what you're looking for. Yeah. Now the stretchers that Nick is talking about, which was an amazing, amazing flip for us. One of my contacts that I met at the local flea market. I met him, I don't know how many years ago, five, seven years ago. I got his phone number and then we do deals outside of the flea market all the time. He comes into great, great items that he actually throws my way. And he came up with 12 stretchers that he got from one of his contacts. And he sent me a picture of him and I was like, oh, those look cool. I think I can make a little bit of money on them.

3:48I showed Melissa and I said, hey, he wants$2 ,200 for this. And that's pretty high for our investment. I mean, I don't have a very high threshold that I like to invest in a lot of money out on top of the items that we're doing. I just don't, I don't feel comfortable investing a lot of money. And this was definitely on the top of it, but$2 ,200 for 12 of them. I bought them. I told Melissa, she told me not to do it. And I said, I really have a good feeling about this. And we actually bought those$2 ,200 and we sold them. I think Melissa wrote it down for me. I made on those 12 stretchers that we sold.

4:20Yeah, that's just crazy. And he was making money on the deal too. So there's like even opportunity at the wholesale level, basically to find other people like you. Absolutely. Yeah. He always is making money on us. And then we're actually taking it to a nationwide or a global market. And that's how we're able to make our money is because the majority of the stuff that we sell, we're just bringing it to a bigger market. So 2200 bucks worth of investment into$35 ,000 worth of sales. And that's just, you know, one example, but that was a big chunk of the revenue for the year, for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

4:48And I was super excited when I got those. But still, we are able to find a lot of other stuff. We really hone in on these high profit items. That's what we really love. And we have three kids, we have a growing family, and we want to be able to spend time with my wife and our kids. And this is what allows us to do it. I mean, you throw this up on eBay, and all of a sudden, they're worth, you know, so much more just because you knew there was some inherent value in them way beyond the 2200 bucks. So the cool thing about eBay is they'll give you an actual record of the last 90 days in sales. So when he sent me the picture of them, they were yellow stretchers.

5:19And I jumped on. I saw what the brand was. It was a striker. I jumped onto eBay. I checked out what they had sold for in the last 90 days. And I didn't know the exact model. But I had a stretcher and I had striker. And I knew kind of what they looked like. I jumped on and looked at the active listings and the sold listings and saw that I was going to be able to make money. Okay. Which we sold one for double what I paid for the whole lot of 12 of them. So that just gives you an idea. But there's always a way to do the research before you go out the money. Yeah. So who bought them? Like other like EMT, like ambulance companies or like hospitals?

5:49It's funny. I sold one to Puerto Rico and I think the majority of the people who bought them were transportation. Companies that had ambulances or they redid ambulances for transportation companies that were, they go and pick up patients and stuff like that. So I feel like that is who we sold them to. But the first ones that I sold, I sold way, way too cheap because I was trying to recoup my investment back. Some guy locally wanted four of them and I sold them for way too cheap. I think I, the first four I sold since he bought four of them, I think I sold them for like$1 ,500 a piece, but still recouped my whole investment on those first four.

6:21And then I started asking a little bit more money and we made a lot more money on the other ones. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So this was just through a contact of yours by showing up at the local flea market, telling people what you do, the kind of stuff that you're looking for. Yeah. So somebody I met, he had cool items. It wasn't like the first week that I found him. It was more of, I had gone consistently to the flea market back when we started our business. I went consistently every Saturday and Sunday morning and I started finding those vendors that were doing or selling the kind of items that I like.

6:50And then I started creating relationships after I saw them week after week after week. And then I started creating that contact with them afterwards. Yeah. And the contrast here is these, you know, one off. We've called them, you know, random items, these niche specialty items, sometimes commercial equipment where there's absolutely people who can make it work, you know, making 10, 15, 20 bucks a flip on Poshmark and stuff like that. But the volume that you need to make up for one stretcher sale in this example is quite a bit more work. Yeah, there's going to be a little bit more logistics in packing and shipping something that's larger.

7:23But I think the argument is going to be made that it's more worthwhile, at least, you know, versus, you know, throwing a throw in an article of clothing in the mail and making that 10 bucks. So next one on this list I have is a Turbo Chef commercial oven. Tell me about that one. So this is a really cool story as well. We were traveling when I found this Turbo Chef on, I believe it was OfferUp was the app that I was on. And it was in Salt Lake City, somewhere up there, somewhere a long way away from us. We were traveling and I found this from the hotel room. We actually got in the hotel for the night.

7:52I'm laying down in bed and I'm trying to source in the area. So in the next morning, hopefully I could go pick something up. This is your version of doom scrolling. Like what else? What's for sale nearby? Yes. So I'm doing that. I'm laying in bed, trying to go to sleep. And I'm looking and I find this Turbo Chef. And the guy had, I believe it was, he might've been asking like$650. I don't remember exactly what he was asking for it. I reached out and asked him if he would take$500 cash. And the problem was when I reached out to him, he didn't write back for me. And we were only in that area for that night.

8:19The next night we were going further West, but he reached out to me like a couple of days later and we were already over in California or Idaho. But when he wrote back, he did say, yes, he would take$500. So I said, Hey, we're coming back through. And it was another three or four days. Would you be available? And then I set up the appointment. And on our way back, I met up with him. And when I got there, he said that he had three of these. Now, my problem was I only had$800 in cash on me. And this guy was just meeting me to do this delivery. And he said he had three more. And I said, by chance, if I took two, would you go$400 a piece on them?

8:50And he said, yes, I will. And I'll go back in right now. And he brought it out on a cart. The first one out on the cart, he was waiting for me. He helped me load it into the truck. He took the cart back in and got the other one. So I ended up getting two of these bad boys and we paid$400 a piece for him. So$800 total. And then we sold them on eBay for$7 ,500 and then$10 ,000. Wow. Incredible. I think the favorite part is that like you were turning all of this, you know, family road trip time into like business mileage right off. Like, oh, I'm so I'm sourcing over here, even if I'm halfway across the country.

9:21And now was able to score some inventory while we're there, pay for the whole trip. And then so, yeah, that's one of the things that we've really kind of turned the corner on is how can we make every trip that we do? How can we pay for it by flipping and get some write-off because of what we're doing on the trip. We were just down in the Keys, man, it was probably a month ago, beginning of August. We go down for lobster season. And on the way back, I wanted to be able to pay for our trip. So I looked for something. I found an oven for$120. We actually just sold it. I shipped it out last week and we sold it for$3 ,000.

9:49So that's kind of my game is when I travel, what can I find that I can buy while we're out and then I can bring it back and sell it and pay for the trip. Yeah. As long as you've driven to the trip, you have some means to like bring it back. Yeah. In our business, I always have the means. So I'll either take a trailer or I'll take an extended hitch. I take something knowing that I might be able to find something and then I'll bring it back with me. I guess the same question is like people are letting go of this stuff just because they don't want to, they don't either know how relatively simple it is to sell on eBay or they don't, they just don't want to deal with it.

10:18And we did a recent episode with a guy who was doing like similar business with what he called like junk land parcels. And it was like, they have title issues or they have, maybe they don't have sewer or maybe they need some sort of variance or easement or something like to make the plot buildable. And he's like, I've been doing this for decades. I don't mind dealing with City Hall. I go through that red tape or to 10X my money. But he's like, I tried to buy from what he called don't wanters. They don't want to deal with it. Maybe they inherited it. They just, they let it go for way, way, way less than it's worth.

10:47Yeah, same thing. Exactly. I also feel like one of the big common denominators for us is people are selling in the local market. So where I'm buying something, it's typically on Facebook Marketplace. that's only going to reach that local market to where you know in Facebook Marketplace, a larger item, they're only going to show it within, you know, a 10, 15 mile radius, sometimes more, but for the majority of you're only going to reach, depending on the app, maybe 25, 40, 50 ,000 people have the opportunity that are shopping for that exact item to where when you get it and throw it onto an app like eBay, that's got over 130, 235 million registered users.

11:22You just have a bigger pool of people looking for that specific item so you can sell it quicker and ask more money for it. Yeah. I've been in the same boat where it's like, I don't want to bother with shipping. So I know that I'm limiting myself to, you know, whoever happens to see it on marketplace, but come take it away. I need it out of the garage. You know, maybe somebody else made some money on that. And that's how a lot of people are too. They just want to get rid of it. They're going to be done with it. And that's where we swoop in and we will go the extra mile to actually make the extra money on it.

11:46Fair enough. Fair enough. Especially if the returns are there, like in, like in these cases, the other thing that, uh, that showed up while I was trying to dig up some of your best flips was this autoclave. And I had to even look up like what this is. It's some sort of like scientific cleaning, like sterilization type of device. Yeah. That was another one from the same guy that I got the stretchers from sold me the autoclave as well. I believe I paid a hundred or 120 bucks for that. And if I'm not mistaken, it was around three to$5 ,000 that we sold it for, but same deal. This guy who gets paid that I met at the flea market, created the relationship with, he gets paid to clear out businesses.

12:24Businesses go out of business for whatever reason. They get rid of equipment. They get rid of a lot of stuff and he goes in and gets it. And then he snaps a picture, sends it to me and I'm able to buy it from him where he's making money. Typically the stuff that he gets is free. It's all free what he's getting because he's getting paid to get rid of the items. And that was the deal with this autoclave is I got it from him, put it on eBay. We actually shipped it out and we made some really, really good profit on that. Yeah. My notes say a hundred dollar acquisition price into 5 ,000 or 5 ,500 in sales price, minus out eBay fees, minus out shipping, or I don't know, do you tack on shipping?

12:55It didn't seem like this was a huge, huge item. Yeah, it was heavy, though. It was a size of a large microwave, if you think of it about that size, but it was heavy. And I don't know, it's a commercial piece of equipment that they put in tools, like operation tools or stuff to sterilize them. That's what it was. I didn't even know that all I knew was the name of it. Like I told you from the beginning, I'm not the smartest guy, not the smartest crayon in the box. I know the name, the model, and then I do all the research to see what it's worth. And when he gave me the name, now this guy that sends me pictures, he takes a picture of the name, the model.

13:24He knows that's what I need to make a decision on if I'm going to buy it or not. But yeah, this one, it did go on a pallet. So actually was shipped on a pallet, but we made from a hundred dollars to$5 ,500. Absolutely. And eBay fees are pretty, I mean, we, when we actually do the whole breakdown, we tell everybody how much we pay eBay. We tell how much shipping and all that stuff is for everybody who watches in on our stuff. And eBay fees typically are about 13 % until they cap that at$2 ,500. And then after$2 ,500, it drops down. I think it's like 2.3 % or 2.7 % for everything over$2 ,500. So when I'm selling some of these items that are$7 ,000,$10 ,000,$20 ,000, they actually bring the fees way, way down.

13:59It makes it that much easier for us to be able to sell them on their platform. Yeah, that's kind of crazy. What was the most expensive thing that you've ever sold? This is a really cool one. And it was another one at the top of the bracket that Melissa, Melissa's my wife if you don't know. But Melissa, it made her very uncomfortable for this one. And I told her I knew the profit was there, but it was an actual parking lot tower. Like a security watchtower. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yes. So this thing raised in the air like 20 feet, 30 feet, something like that. It was on a trailer. So you pulled it anywhere you wanted to do.

14:30You parked it. Then you got inside of it, cranked up a generator. It lifted you all the way up so you could see over the whole parking lot. But we paid$5 ,000 for it. And that's a lot for me to spend on an item. And I have to know that the return's there. But before I bought it, I looked at what the retail and I couldn't find any comps. Nobody was selling these. I hadn't even seen any other one for sale. But the retail on this was like$125 ,000 or$135 ,000. So I said, if I can get this thing for$5 ,000, I know I can make money. And we sold it in less than 30 days for$25 ,000. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's a nice ROI.

14:59In a given month, what are you sitting on in terms of inventory? Like, do you think about it in terms of turn rate? Do you think about it in terms of like storage? Like, where do I keep all this stuff? Like, where am I going to put a parking lot security tower? That's not going to fit in my garage. Like where am I storing this stuff? Yeah. So what we do at the scale that we're at now that we do have to have a storage. We have a storage facility. I have a building. I believe it's like 1 ,400, 1 ,500 square feet. So it's not monstrous, but it's big enough. And I have some outside parking and stuff like that.

15:26So you do have to, and we grew into this business. When I started the business, I lived in a duplex. The only thing I did was I used my spare bedroom. I had a spare bedroom. That was my office. That's where I stored everything. That's where I created boxes. That's where I did everything. But as we grew and I saw what the profits are, yes, we do have a warehouse that we have stuff stored in. I have places where I can park stuff outside, inside, whatever I need to do. And yeah, typically we sit on$500 ,000 worth of inventory, but it's not like somebody who has a lot of smalls. I mean, that is a lot, a lot of smalls in that inventory.

15:55For ours, our average sale price, like last year, our average sale price was$2 ,000 per item. And some items are more and some items are a little bit less, but on average, that's kind of what we go with. No, that's not your acquisition cost. That's like your expected resale value. On gross, that's what we kind of, on what we sold last year, we did$92 ,000 and that was in 46 items that we sold. So it was just over$2 ,000. But like I said, and profit wise, after eBay fees, after shipping, after everything we paid out, it was still over like 70, I think it was 73 ,000 and some change on the profit side of it.

16:25Yeah. So you could like source nothing for years and slowly sell down this thing and still have several hundred thousand dollars worth of profits there. Absolutely. I'm really good at finding deals. And sometimes the deals might need a little thing. They might need something. So I'm really good at finding and buying them, but I'm not the greatest on getting them listed. So I do have probably$300 ,000 worth of stuff that is sitting in my warehouse or sitting in my garage. I have a detached garage as well that I have not got listed yet for whatever reason it is. But that's money that's not making me money.

16:56Yeah, that's nobody's going to find it if it's not if it's not online. But that's that's the challenge. It sounds like kind of a common challenge. Like I love the treasure hunt component of it. I love the thrill of making that sale. But then like the photography component, the writing the product descriptions, the measurements, the even even sometimes the seller or the buyer interactions, especially Facebook marketplace is the worst. Like where, you know, just so many random bots. I don't know. I assume they're bots who just ask you, is this still available? The pain that goes into it, but the pain is where the profit comes from.

17:26So the next one that I have on my list is these Air Force floodlights from like Cold War era floodlights, like looking for like searchlights, looking for planes. Yeah, this was a really cool one as well. So if you haven't found the like thing with our story is I love weird stuff. I love stuff that nobody else sees value in for whatever reason. Or yeah, that's what I really, really hone in on. I try to find stuff like that. We bought six of these huge spotlights. And when I say huge, the light itself was probably six foot tall. And then it sat on a military trailer. Just a beast of a light in it.

17:59The light bulb. It's not like a normal light bulb that you would think of. It actually had a hole, a tube going through the light mechanism itself, and it would run radiator fluid through it to cool it down. This is how bright these things are. You are not allowed to turn these on within a 10-mile radius of an airport. That's how bright they are. Insane! Oh, my gosh. But did they work? Yes, they did. So they absolutely worked. You had to have a special generator since they were, and don't quote me, I'm not 100 % sure, but I think they were manufactured in the 70s, 60s, or 70s. They had military generators that were on a different frequency.

18:31Okay. That was the only thing that could run them was that frequency. So you had to have a generator to do it. The first guy that we sold one to, he actually had the generator. He brought it down. He cranked the sucker up and we saw like the bat, the bat light. This thing just went to heaven on how bright it was, but it was insane how bright it was. So to give you an idea, they used them in the war. They got rid of them. And then they actually, I think they either NASA bought them or somehow NASA got their hands on them. And they used two on each side of the runway at NASA, a 10 mile runway. And that's how they, they lit up the runway for the space shuttle to come in and land or with these lights.

19:06And don't ask me how they ended up at an auction that I was at, but they ended up at an auction and we ended up paying, I think it was like 360 or$370 per light. And then, uh, yeah, we sold, we were selling them. I think it was between seven and$10 ,000 per light when we actually, when we actually sold them. One went out to, if you've heard of Burning Man, a guy out there, I bought, I think the first one went out there and then he bought a couple more after that. So yeah, just a crazy, crazy story, but really, really cool item that we got to come in contact with and then get it to somebody. All right.

19:33So I'm hearing local auctions. I'm hearing contacts at the flea market, offer up Facebook marketplace, finding a guy who gets paid to clean out businesses where they go out of business, like all of these different sourcing methods. And then looking for those bigger, bulkier items that other people are a little hesitant to touch, but you know, there's got to be some inherent value there to the right buyer. Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head, all these different places were able to do it. And we've just been doing it for so long. I'm looking for those unique items that a lot of people won't say, Hey, I'm going to throw that on a pallet.

20:07I'm going to ship it. A lot of our items do do that, but a lot of them also go in boxes. So we still ship on FedEx or UPS, but it is, it has to be that right item. Yeah. And we've heard from, uh, you know, people who really of honing in on a flipping niche. Like I focus on shoes and maybe even specifically like men's dress shoes, flipping used cell phones. And I mean, we've talked about like flipping domain names and every it's like everybody's got a niche. And if there's a way to describe your niche, it's just big, big, profitable stuff. Absolutely. We're looking for those big, big items that yeah, we can turn around and make a profit on for sure.