So House Flipping is Your Thing? Really.

Believe it or not, house flipping is back with the housing recovery. And while there’s money to be made from flipping houses, there’s also money to be made from selling things to would-be flippers. Flipping workshops are crowded again.

House Flipping Workshops

At a recent workshop just outside Baltimore on a recent Saturday, Terry Royce, who’s been flipping houses for many years, was sharing some of his secrets. Everything from how to find a seller, or a buyer, even time management tips.

“I always like to say, this workshop stuff is gonna go wrong”. It is. And that’s the reality.

It was Royce’s first workshop. He charged $97 for a morning seminar and an afternoon bus tour of some homes that were being flipped.

Zane Watkins was among those on the bus. He said he’d been to four or five other workshops, one that cost him and his wife $300 and ended with a hard sell for another series of seminars.

“They had three different versions of the package,” he recalled. “One was $10,000, next was $15,000 and finally $22,000.”

BBB Rating Workshops “D”

The Better Business Bureau rates these types of workshops. They are now tracking 130 of them. “Of that, only one is a BBB accredited business with an A,” said spokesperson Katherine Hutt. “We have one that has a B+, 13 that have Cs and all the rest have Ds or Fs.”

Hutt said the BBB gets several hundred complaints a year from consumers saying they didn’t get what they paid for by flipping workshops. And when they tried to get their money back, they ran into a brick wall. Hutt said, “just like buying a home, when it comes to flipping workshops, it’s buyer beware”.

Featured in: Marketplace Morning Report for Thursday, May, 2014, by Nancy Marshall-Genzer.