Dropping the F-bomb: Why 'Flip' is outdated AF with Erin Clark

If you've ever dreamed of investing in real estate but felt like you needed more money, more experience, or more time—this minisode is for you. Erin Clark didn’t start with capital or a plan. She started with a willingness to say yes and learn by doing.

In this powerful highlight reel from my full-length conversation with Erin, you'll hear the 10 most empowering takeaways from her journey: how she built a thriving business renovating and reselling homes, partnered with investors without using her own cash, and developed a creative brand that buyers actually seek out.

Whether you’re curious about getting into your first investment project or want a new perspective on what it means to build with care and confidence, Erin’s story is packed with actionable insight and inspiration.

Want the full blueprint? Don’t miss the full episode. Erin breaks it all down—from working with investor partners to calculating risk and finding your zone of genius. Go back and listen—it’s gold.

1. Redefining the F-Word in Real Estate

Erin doesn’t call herself a house flipper—she's intentional about the language she uses because it reflects the thoughtfulness behind her projects.

2. You Don’t Need Capital to Start

Erin built her business with zero personal capital by focusing on her time, skills, and project management.

3. Say Yes—Even When You Don’t Know How

Erin's whole business started by saying yes to something she had never done before—and betting on herself.

4. Confidence Is a Muscle Built Through Action

Rather than being fearless, Erin learned to get back up after falling—and that built lasting confidence.

5. Leverage YOUR Superpower

Erin discovered later in life that her spontaneous “just go for it” approach was rooted in ADHD—and it’s become one of her strengths.

6. Time Is a Valuable Investment Tool

IErin’s resource was time. For others looking to get started, offering time and skills can be the door into a new career.

7. Partnering Without Over-Renovating

Avoiding over-renovation starts with knowing your neighborhood inside and out—and having systems that protect profit.

8. Build a Brand, Not Just a House

Every home Erin touches tells a story—she designs with the future buyer in mind, building trust and demand.

9. Profit Sharing Can Start Small and Grow Fast

Returns can be strong even on modest investments when you have the right strategy and partnerships.

10. Don’t Let Fear Be Louder Than Possibility

If there’s even a whisper of curiosity in you, follow it—your future self may just thank you for it.

Want to learn more about real estate investing? Follow me on IG @annreedandco where I share daily musings on real estate, mindfulness, being an almost empty nester, and more. 

Looking for additional support, community, and accountability to help you build your real estate portfolio? Hop on the waitlist for the Soulful Investor Society, a community membership for real estate investors and those who'd like to get in the game. Once on the waitlist, you'll be the first to know when the doors open AND you'll get lots of amazing freebies, including a FREE 1:1 coaching session with me, where we'll map out your plan from start to finish, so you can finally buy that investment property and scale your portfolio. 

Transcript

Welcome to A Few Good Doors, a podcast created to show you just how possible investing in real estate is for most Americans and how it can be an incredibly powerful tool for creating wealth over time. Do you feel like it's too late or you don't have enough money? Listen up. If you can qualify for one mortgage, I can show you how to become a real estate investor.

Once you embrace the how and the why, you can repeat the process. Acquiring four or more properties over the course of 10 to 15 years Can and should have a massive wealth effect. I believe that everyone deserves to live up to their full potential and having good people with money is what will change the world.

I'm your host, Anne Reed, and my mission is to help you make the world a better place with a few good doors of your own.  

If you've ever dreamed of investing in real estate, but you felt like you needed more money, more experience, or more time, this mini sode is for you. Erin Clark didn't start with capital or a plan. She started with a willingness to say yes and learn by doing. In this powerful highlight reel from my full length conversation with Erin, you'll hear the 10 most empowering takeaways from her journey, how she built a thriving business, renovating and reselling homes. Partnered with investors without using her own cash and developed a creative brand that buyers actually seek out.

Whether you're curious about getting into your first investment project or want a new perspective on what it means to build with care and confidence, Erin's story is packed with actionable insight and inspiration.

Want the full blueprint? Don't miss the full  episode. Erin breaks it all down. From working with investor partners to calculating risk and finding your zone of genius, go back and listen. It's gold.

   Redefining the F word in real estate. Erin doesn't call herself a house flipper. She's intentional about the language she uses because it reflects the thoughtfulness behind her projects. 

I get the phrase, you know, but flip to me just feels it's fast. It's the, the notion is that it's been disregarded. It's been mass produced. I mean, you know, it's like, there's not a lot of thought in it when you do that. Those are the words that come to mind when I think of a flip.

Right. And I, I, our first project was a flip. I mean, I put a lot of thought into it and a lot of creativity. But I didn't know what I was doing at the time. Like I really, I mean, I will be really honest in that instance. I was naive and I, I didn't know all the things. I was taught a lot of stuff along the way, but after that, our projects really became, they are renovations. So when I work with vendors and when I work with other people, I let them know, Hey, yes we are selling this house. I don't say we flip it. We are reselling it at the end of the day, but we are not here to  just churn it out and not think about it and then put it back on the market.

Because I live where I renovate because I am the listing agent. Because I'm the buying agent. Because I am the one who has my sign in the yard and my branding on it. Like if it goes bad, my reputation is on the line. My, I have liability that's connected to it. There's a lot of risk.  So I am super clear about what we do, and that we don't cut corners. My subs have learned like, Hey, this isn't just another flipper.

You don't need capital to start. Erin built her business with zero personal capital by focusing on her time, skills, and project management.  

So actually, my very first client was a person who wanted to get their own house and they couldn't find what they wanted. And so they said, Hey, will you help us renovate it for ourselves? I said, well, I've never done that as a like project manager, contractor, designer,  nothing. But if you're willing to let me learn on this project and I'll charge you just a very nominal fee for my time and energy, then yeah, let's do it.

And it just kind of launched from there. Complete accident, no intention in ever renovating houses, putting them back on the market, selling them, et cetera. And four years later, I have learned a ton. I love sharing and, have found a pretty successful, what I find, pretty successful way of coming into real estate investment without any of my own capital.

I provide a lot of other things, but I don't bring my own money to the table, which I think is what most people are interested in when they get started and they don't have a lot of their own capital to, to get going with.

Say Yes even when you don't know how. Erin's whole business started by saying yes to something she had never done before and betting on herself.

Yeah, so basically our first, very first project that I said yes to as far as a renovate and resell was this house that we looked at. The client I was working with, he's still one of my partners today.  He had a list of rentals. He thought he wanted to pick up a rental property, and it was on the list and I'd seen it before and I said, are you sure you wanna go see it?

I know it's in pretty bad condition. And he said, yeah, it's on the list like, I didn't mean to put it on there, but let's. And I said, okay. So it was the last house we looked at and walked it and it was in really rough shape. He's like, Hey, you know, same thing. Like do you wanna do this? I'm like, never done it.

I don't know how we'd structure this. Our structure that we had on Project One is different than what it looks like now, but it was a learning opportunity for both of us and we were able to, really kind of figure out what it meant and what it cost and how it all worked together. So yeah, so we said yes.

I said yes, let's do it. We put the offer in and we didn't get the house, like we didn't get it The first time, it got sold off to some wholesaler, not sold, but under contract with a wholesaler. This was the end of December in 2019, and I was. About to have a baby. Like, I mean, I was having pregnant with my third, or my last baby, my third pregnancy, and she was due any day and we was waiting, waiting, waiting.

And then in January, rolled around and I had her, in January of 2020 and the day after that house came back on the market and my partner reached out and he said, Hey, this just came back on Can we write an offer up on it? And I was like, well, just literally had a baby, but Sure. Um, so I'm at home typing up the offer and we got the deal.

Confidence is a muscle built through action

rather than being fearless. Erin learned to get back up after falling, and that built lasting confidence.

 I see it and I'm kinda like, oh, how hard could that be? Like, let's just try it and do it. It's, it's absolutely the knowing of like. I'm probably gonna fail and when I fail I need to know that I can be sad about it or whatever, but, or upset or, but that I've gotta figure out a way to pick myself back up, take it, learn from it, and then move forward so I don't make that mistake again.

I make mistakes in every project, but I rarely make the same mistake twice. And I think there's a lot of like just. The ability to feel okay with one, making mistakes, and two, teaching yourself, you can fall in your face and get back up. And I guess I've just allowed myself to do that. My family's allowed me to do that.

My husband has been gracious in letting me do that and not making me feel awful for making mistakes or things that other people might really struggle with. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I'm just like, well. How, I don't know. How hard can it be? Let's find out. 

   Leverage your superpower. Erin discovered later in life that her spontaneous just go for it. Approach was rooted in A DHD and it's become one of her superpowers. 

 I, I share a lot in my personal life and in my professional life that my early days of making decisions and saying how hard can it be was actually a symptom or product of my late in life diagnosed A DHD. So my A DHD has that. Like let's just do it kind of spontaneity and personality, which in a lot of ways can be really great. I have a lot, I have a lot less fear around just trying something and like being like, that feels good and fun, let's do that, or whatever.

As I've gotten older and I had a lot more introspection and an official diagnosis. I am like, oh, that's where those things came from. I think having that ability to sort of do those things and land on my face sometimes and land on my feet sometimes and brush myself off without knowing that official diagnosis probably is the thing that helps build the most amount of my confidence in doing that.

Now I have some more like rational brain skills and  meds to support the fact that I need to like maybe think through a few more steps ahead of just like leaping off the cliff, which is what I was known to do in my younger days. And so I think that process has been really helpful. 

Time is a valuable investment tool.

Erin's resource was time for others looking to get started. Offering time and skills can be the door into a new career.  

 At first we ran some numbers and they weren't quite what. We thought they would be, but we lucked out in a sense that the sale price on the other side was actually higher than we initially thought when we started the project, just because of how prices had ticked up in that timeframe. So when we run the numbers, we always run it to make sure that the end of the day we are not going to lose money.

That's the number one priority. The investor who brings the money in these partnerships I have now, they bring the money, so they hold a majority of the risk. They hold the money risk. That's a big one. Like I'm so aware of that because I don't bring the money to the table. I bring, I find the house and run the project and do the design and all those things, those components, and then list it and sell it.

On the other side, all of mine is my time. My primary, my primary resource that I'm risking is time. I could get to the end and I could not get paid what my time was worth and they could get to the end. And the goal is to make sure at a minimum they don't lose any money, that their money is paid back. So that's kind of how we got started.

Partnering without Over renovating.

Avoiding over renovation starts with knowing your neighborhood inside and out, and having systems that protect profit.  

I specialize personally in this condi in this area, I specialize in like a very  niched neighborhood. I'm not a a renovator who's gonna really go outside of my sort of bubble scope that I have.

I do that for a couple reasons, but one is that I know the area inside and out. I know what the house like. I know that we can push the top of certain neighborhoods and markets. I know that when we sell a house. Sometimes we can be the trendsetter, and what to do to support those numbers and what people are gonna pay for on a property.

So much of it has to do with your contractors. So developing a contracting team, which has taken me a significant amount of time, because that is the fickle industry, it's a fickle world, and I've had a lot of bad scenarios where I've had to go and find another plumber. Twice over in a project I've been, you know, so running into those things and then just making sure that there's a deep enough margin in the profit side so that if heaven forbid we run over on the time or we run over in this particular area, at least the money is gonna be a, you know, not lost.

I've been very lucky that we've never. Lost on a project. We've never been in the negative. Most of the time we make a decent profit. We've had one project that we made profit, but it was not nearly as much as what we had planned to, based on a lot of problems that we ran into with contractors and timing and some other stuff.

So we run those numbers. I have a massive spreadsheets that. Has all kinds of formulas built into it. So we run the numbers on like all the costs we think are gonna be implied, not just on the renovation, but we get caught a lot of times in the beginning. You know, we didn't consider all of our carrying costs.

Build a brand, not just a house.

Every home Erin touches tells a story she designs with a future buyer in mind. Building trust and demand.

 A lot of it is about the. Making the project different than every other flip house out there. There are companies that are coming in and buying up projects and turning them over in three months and yeah, they might be done quickly, but they look exactly the same as the house three doors down, or, you know, across the street.

And they're not, they're not homes that have character in them and they're charging a crap ton of money for these houses that have basic everything. We put a lot of. I'd say standard type stuff in our projects, but we knock out some spaces that make the house so incredibly different. I pride myself in that.

I pride myself in making the house function for an ideal buyer avatar that I build out. I spend a lot of time thinking like. Who is gonna buy this house? Who is gonna live here? How is that family or individual or person gonna grow their life here? Are they gonna have children? Like, is this house large enough or that's the case?

I dive in so deep into all of these aspects and I think that's what makes our projects different and unique. And I think that's why people are willing to, to pay upwards of them too. And that gives us a lot of a higher buffer in our, in our profit. 

Profit sharing can start small and grow fast.

Returns can be strong even on modest investments when you have the right strategy and partnerships. 

 In a, in a ideal world, in a perfect world, six months would be my ideal return. That's if we're not doing additions. We're, you know, able to move forward. We don't have any delays. Six, six months will be great. Most of the projects we're seeing is somewhere between seven and eight months on these bigger ones, just because they take a little bit more time.

'cause we customize more. So there's a window there. but let's just take the project to have right now. Investor came close to a hundred thousand dollars at the closing table. So that in addition to. What I call our recycled money. When we close on that house, we'll probably make the profit on that is slated to be between 40 and $50,000 each for him.

So that's 40. You know, 40% you've bid in a hundred, you're making another 40, you're getting all your money back, plus. 40 K in, let's call it 40 conservatively, right? We're trying hard to make the returns 30% or more if I can. So 30, you gimme a hundred thousand dollars, I'm gonna try and get you an extra 30 K off of that.

So that's more than you'd be making if you were leaving it in a high-yield savings account or somewhere else. And at the end of the day, I always talk about. This recycled money prospect where we take our money and then we use it and then you get it back. But I've made a chunk over here and then I'm adding into the pot so I can do a bigger project or more projects and trying to recycle those funds over the course of that and make, you know make that back. 

Don't let fear be louder than possibility. If there's even a whisper of curiosity in you, follow it. Your future self may just thank you for it.

I think the biggest thing, and I think given the premise of, you know, your listener in the podcast and what you're hoping to connect with people or like relay to them is that it's, I mean, even as someone who grew up in real estate investing, I still found it really overwhelming.

I thought like, I mean, it just felt really scary and it does have risk, but I think that it's, I think that there's ways to do it that's easier than.  People think, and I feel like if there's even like a small little part of you, like a little voice that's saying, Hey, I wanna figure out how to do this.

Maybe it's not what I do. Maybe it is a different strategy, but I think. Finding the person has is like a few steps ahead of you or maybe multiple steps ahead of you and just getting mentorship or coaching or whatever it is to just see like, what do I really need to do? Is it as hard as I think it is?

'cause I think we get in our head so much of the time about like, oh, it's all this and we need to be perfect and I need to have every little detail lined out. And it just stops us from doing the thing that really could change our life. I mean, this thing that I decided to do. Has dramatically changed my life and, and shown me so many things I'm exceptional at that I never would have known.

Like I truly feel that way about what I do. I've never been one to brag about myself, but I'm really, I'm really good at this. Um, and I, and I didn't have that. Oh, I agree. I just have never had anything where I really felt so strongly about it, but I think that's the thing. I think just don't let. The little voice of fear be bigger than the voice of the possibility.

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