Ryan Pineda was making $8k a month flipping couches back in 2014. When he became a YouTuber in 2020, he made a video detailing his process. Little did he know that that video would spread its legs and give birth to an entire new industry. Sorry for the visual. But yeah, tons of people started doing it as a side hustle, many of ’em documenting their experiences on social media. Ryan just did a new video to see if it’s still viable for 2023 and beyond.
He found a Facebook Group dedicated to couch flipping, went in there, and interviewed the top earners. How much were they making? What’s changed with the business? What’s stayed the same? How do you maximize profits? Ryan was about to find out. One dude, Umberto, a 23-year-old from New Jersey, has been flippin’ couches for about a year now. He does it to save up money to take trips with. Says he pockets about $300 per flip, and made $40-, maybe $50 grand doing this over the last 12 months.
Jason, 41, had a full-time job and just wanted a way to make some extra money on the side. He made more than a little extra. Now he’s doing about $10k a month through couch flipping. Another guy Ryan talked to, Walter, had been in the game for about a year as well. He’s doing about $9k a month, putting in maybe 30 hours a week. A 28-year-old named Daniel told Ryan that he was profiting $20k a month. Mikhail was right around that same number.
Jeez, you can make that much reselling sectionals old guys have been farting into and kids have been flicking boogers on for the last however many years? That’s insane. Even more insane? These people actually seem to enjoy doing it. “It’s fun,” Umberto says, though I’m struggling to believe him. “You meet really cool people. I met people with like junk removal companies. One of my current hard money lenders, he was awesome; I’m still friends with him today. Met him through couch flipping. Dude, I love it.”
But you are gonna have some awkward encounters. One time, one of the flippers had to pick up a couch from what was essentially a crack house. Bars on all the windows, sketchy people stumbling in and out. Another guy got chewed out by some old lady when she realized he was gonna flip her couch for a profit. She had wanted it to go to someone in need. Ironically enough, it did: home boy sold it to a man in Section 8 housing who paid his full asking price and even tipped him $100 on top of it. Go figure, right?
Some of the other challenges? You always gotta be searching for the next deal, scrolling through Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, OfferUp, what have you. So one guy got smart and developed his own Chrome extension to scour some of these platforms, and notify him when something interesting pops up. “That saves me a good four hours a week,” he said. “And just recently, I got these four insanely good deals in like a 10-day stretch. Made $4,700 profit. Now we wanna sell our tech to other couch flippers.”
Believe it or not, Ryan met his developer for his Tykes NFT through couch flipping. He had a similar setup where he kinda built the software to streamline the biz while his brother handles the grunt work. They’re thinking about scaling up by getting a warehouse where they can store inventory so they’re not limited by how many pick-ups and drop-offs they can do in a single day. Heck, they could buy entire truckloads of sectionals and have it delivered all at once. Still not for me, but pretty eye-opening, huh?
