w hen Ken and Anita Corsini first entered the world of real estate in 2005, the scene was very different than it is today. “It’s amazing to think back about the market cycles we’ve been through,” Ken recalled. “2005 was a screaming hot market, then 2008 brought it to a screeching halt. We were able to thrive in the downturn, but it was mainly because we have always been able to quickly change strategies.” “Every couple of years we see the market is doing something new, reorient ourselves, and implement new strategies to be successful,” Anita added. “I think they could re-make that sci-fi movie, Adaptation , about us and real estate!” NOTNEWBIES, BUTNEWIDEAS The couple, perhaps most widely known for their hit television series, Flip or Flop: Atlanta on HGTV, is not nearly as new to real estate as they are to television. The two bought their first house, “right out of college” as Anita said, when they were both 23 years old in 2000. Less than two years later, they purchased two acres and began building the home of their dreams. “From building retaining walls to laying secondhand hardwood flooring and pouring our own driveway, we learned a lot about homebuilding,” Ken said. When the house was done, they had three very important results: their “very own slice of heaven on two acres,” an investment property in the form of their first house, and an appreciation of the potential for their future that lay in real estate. Also, on that slice of heaven sat a red barn that served as an incubator for their current real estate business, Red Barn Homes, for the next four years. In 2005, Ken departed a corporate job to invest in real estate full-time. Anita left her first passion, teaching A.P. calculus, in 2007 to officially join him in the business. By this point, Ken had kept his head above water through the worst of the housing crash and “houses were cheap and plentiful
in Atlanta,” as he described it. Anita put it a little more bluntly: “The world was our oyster.” The two began acquiring distressed properties, fixing them up, installing tenants, and then selling them to investors in the first manifestation of the turnkey model. That model continued to evolve over the course of the next seven years, only to change when “the hedge funds descended on Atlanta and started gobbling up the inventory,” Ken said. “It was time to reinvent ourselves again. Prices were creeping up and you couldn’t find deals that made sense for our model anymore, so it was getting difficult.” Today, in addition to their central role in the television coverage of their deals all over the Atlanta metro area, the Corsinis have launched a real estate brokerage, Red Barn Real Estate, which has grown to 100 agents in its first year, and are busy running their boutique new-construction business, which launched in 2014. “It really just made sense to make that change,” said Ken. “We had to pivot because the market was creating a situation where it enabled us to sell houses retail rather than directly to investors.” “Our average rehab right now is hovering [in cost] around $89,000,” Anita said. “That’s practically like building a new house. Today, our time and energy are best spent selling to retail, but in a year, I might tell you something completely different. The Atlanta market can be tricky. If you stick with the same things you have always done, your opportunities are going to dry up quickly.”
mortgage fraud and drastically distressed housing in the area. “It just goes to show you should never say never!” he laughed. “Today, nearly all of our deals are inside the perimeter because there are so many blighted neighborhoods that are turning very quickly and there is also a large inventory of older housing stock. With the huge demand right now from buyers to be close to Atlanta, there is so much interest in that area,” he said. One thing that makes the Corsinis’ homes stand out from the crowd is Anita’s keen eye for going just beyond the norm in both design and staging. Interestingly, she credits her success in this area not just to careful analysis and cost-benefit
STRATEGY& STORY: TODAY’S FAVORITE IS THE FIX-AND-FLIP
At present, Ken and Anita are focused on properties in the metro Atlanta area (see map on opposite page), which Ken finds amusing since at one point he had sworn off a certain metro ZIP code because of the high incidences of
20 | think realty magazine :: september 2018
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