Sal is not chasing the obvious deals. After twenty years as a licensed real estate agent in Southern California, he has built a full-time flipping business on a simple premise: the houses most investors reject usually get rejected for the wrong reason.
He got his license in 2004 and spent roughly two decades in retail real estate, representing buyers and sellers. Along the way, his own clients started flipping properties. He watched them do it, took a run at it himself in 2017, and went full time in 2019. He has not looked back.
“It’s the greatest thing I’ve done in real estate,” he says. “I have a lot of time on my hands. I can manage my time a lot better than being directed by a lot of clients. Sometimes I work nine to two, off weekends.”
In the first episode of Behind the Deal, Sal sat down with Jessica from American Heritage Lending to walk through a recent project start to finish. Real numbers, a ten-day close, and a candid read on what has changed about flipping in this market.
The Deal: A 740 Square Foot House in Norwalk
The property was small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, 740 square feet, on a 2,500 square foot lot in the city of Norwalk. Parking in that pocket is genuinely bad, and that was enough for most investors to move on without a second look.
Sal looked closer.
“A lot of investors were passing on it based on that. I looked a little bit deeper, knowing that a lot of people seem to like to live in Norwalk because it’s real close to Los Angeles.”
The parking problem was real. It was also already priced in. What was not priced in was the demand underneath it, and two structural details that changed the math entirely: the windows were already in, and the roof was new.
Those are two of the heaviest line items on any rehab budget. With both handled, Sal could see the whole project before he ever walked a contractor through the door.
“What I saw the vision there was, I could turn this thing around with about $25,000 to $35,000, where usually I spend about $90,000 on a rehab.”
The Norwalk Deal by the Numbers
The $28,000 covered a complete remodel. Bathrooms, flooring, paint, a kitchen remodel, and landscaping work. He finished the rehab in about three and a half weeks and came in $7,000 under his own budget. Then he set his number at $629,000, listed it, and took an offer at $629,000.
Full asking, no negotiation down. Worth stating plainly: this one went about as well as a flip can go. Hitting your exact target price, beating budget, and exiting in nine weeks is an excellent outcome, not a baseline anyone should underwrite to.
Why the Deal Required Hard Money
There was one complication. The seller wanted to close in ten days.
“I reached out and said, Jessica, he closes in ten days. And you said, man, it’s going to be tough, but we’re going to do our best. And you guys got it done.”
That timeline is the entire reason the deal existed. Sellers taking cash offers on distressed property are optimizing for speed and certainty, not for the highest number. If Sal could not clear a ten-day close, the property goes to someone who can.
Sal’s case for hard money on a fix and flip comes down to two problems that stack on top of each other:
The property itself. “A lot of these houses that we purchase are in dire need of repairs, so conventional lending is out the window.” Homes needing significant work frequently will not satisfy the property condition requirements attached to conventional financing. The loan cannot be written, no matter how strong the borrower looks on paper.
The clock. Conventional financing timelines simply do not survive a ten-day close. As Sal puts it, “A lot of these sellers that sell their property for cash, they want to get in and out quick.”
Speed on this kind of purchase is not a convenience. It is what makes the property available to an investor at all, instead of to a retail buyer with a mortgage.
Where Sal Finds Deals Now
Deals have gotten harder to source over the last few years, and the ones that surface are thinner.
“The deals are a little slimmer, a little skinnier,” Sal says.
Most of his current volume comes from wholesalers. They spend heavily on marketing, get homeowners on the phone, put properties under contract, and then bring those contracts to investors like Sal.
The rest comes from relationships he has been building since 2004. Agents who have known him for years call him before a property ever hits the market. His finished projects also generate their own inbound.
“They see my projects online on the MLS, and so I’ll get people reaching out to me and say, hey, I saw you closed this deal. Are you the investor on it?”
What Changed About Underwriting a Flip
This was the most useful stretch of the conversation, and it applies whether you are on your first project or your fortieth.
Three or four years ago, Sal could evaluate a property without leaving his office.
“If someone sent me a house, I could pretty much not even go look at it. I’d just take pictures, know the market, what it’s going to sell for in the area, do some quick comparables, not dive too deep into it.”
That approach stopped working. Homes are sitting longer, and a comparable sale on its own no longer tells you what you need to know. So his analysis got deeper on three specific fronts:
- Days on market for the neighborhood, not the city. A citywide average will hide the block you are actually buying on.
- Concessions. Whether sellers nearby are giving them, and how much A comp that closed with meaningful concessions is not the comp you think it is.
- Competing flips. What other flips in the area are selling for, and what finish level those flips carried.
That last one changed how he spends money. The instinct on a flip is to build the nicest house on the street.
“We tend to sometimes overkill on a flip because we want to be the best one, so we end up spending more money. Now I’ve retracted that and try to spend the money I need to spend to conform with what’s already selling, and not overdo it.”
Over-improving is one of the quieter ways to lose money in a slow market. The upgrade rarely returns its cost, and it adds weeks of holding time you pay for while it happens.
Sal’s Advice for a First Flip
Sal meets a lot of first-time flippers. Wholesalers run showings where twenty people walk through the same house, and he stays in touch with some of the newer investors he meets there. A number of them lost money on their first deal.
His read on why is blunt: they get excited, and they use somebody else’s numbers.
Run your own numbers. “Don’t rely on what other people are telling you. The wholesaler or the agent telling you what the ARV is on the property, what the repair costs are going to be, what you’re going to resell the property for.” The people handing you those figures are not the people who absorb the loss if the figures are wrong.
Build a team you can verify against. “You have to align yourself with a good real estate agent that you could trust to do all this stuff for you, and make sure you have your own numbers.”
Do not underwrite on speculation. New investors talk themselves into a resale number that the market has not supported yet. Sal’s fix is to price the exit conservatively and then stress the timeline.
Sal’s rule: “Price conservatively, price in an extra two to three months of holding costs, and if the deal works for you then, go ahead and do the deal. Just be super conservative on your budget.”
That last piece is the one first-timers skip. Holding costs do not pause while a house sits, and a deal that only pencils on a fast sale is not really a deal.
Why the Lender Relationship Matters
We asked Sal what makes the difference between lenders. His answer had nothing to do with pricing.
“When we close these deals, we have to close the deals. There’s a lot of reputation on the line, a lot of people behind the scenes. The people I buy the houses from, I have a reputation that I’m going to close the deal.”
This is the part newer investors tend to underestimate. Failing to close does not just cost you one property. It costs you standing with the wholesalers and agents who decide who gets the call on the next one. In a market where deals are already scarce, losing your place in that pipeline is expensive in ways that never show up on a settlement statement.
“It’s really important to align myself with the proper lender that’s going to help me close that deal, and close it in a timely fashion.”
On working with Jessica and the AHL team:
“We communicate very well. I can reach out to you anytime I want, you respond back, you get involved. If there are any obstacles that we find, I see you jumping through all the hoops to try to get them done and get the deals closed.”
Apply Sal’s Approach to Your Next Project
Sal’s business does not run on finding secret deals. It runs on looking harder at the ones everyone else dismissed, underwriting them conservatively, and being able to close fast enough to actually win them. That last piece depends on financing that moves at the speed the deal demands. American Heritage Lending has been financing real estate investors since 2004, working through multiple market cycles alongside borrowers like Sal.
As a direct lender, AHL underwrites and funds in house, which means the answer on your file comes from the people actually making the decision rather than from a desk three steps removed from it. That structure is what makes the kind of turnaround Sal needed possible. When a seller wants a ten-day close and your reputation with the wholesaler is riding on hitting it, the difference between lenders is not the term sheet.
It is whether someone picks up the phone when a problem surfaces on day six. AHL’s investor programs cover fix and flip, bridge, rental, and new construction financing, so the same relationship carries from your first project through the ones that come after it.
Have a project you want to walk through? Learn more at ahlend.com or call (800) 745-9280.