In this short “Behind The Hustle” segment, host Sam Parr sits down with Zach to discuss the world of flea market flipping. Zach profiles Rob and Melissa Steffensen, a Florida couple who run the blog Flea Market Flipper and have scaled from reselling baby clothes and shoes all the way up to forklifts and 40-foot Harley-Davidson signs. The conversation covers why the current moment — thrift stores closed, people cleaning house — is a particularly good time to get started, and the surprisingly lucrative logic of taking items from local no-demand to national eBay audiences.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, The Hustle), Zach (guest, The Hustle reporter)
Introduction: The Flea Market Flipper [00:00:00]
Sam: Really high-end prosthetic, and you put it on eBay and someone bought it like within a few hours for a thousand dollars.
Sam: Zach, welcome back.
Zach: Hey, you know, good.
Sam: So this week you’ve got a story on a guy who calls himself the Flea Market Flipper, who has found goods and items online — starting with shoes, baby clothes, things like that — and has worked his way up to buying and flipping construction equipment. Tell us about this guy.
Zach: Yeah, so it’s a couple: Rob and Melissa Steffensen, out of Florida. They basically run this site called Flea Market Flipper. It’s a really cool community — kind of an educational blog where they teach people and give them the tools for how to flip things. And it could be anything, like you said, from baby strollers, purses, shoes, all the way up to forklifts and treadmills.
I think Rob was at the point last year where he’s buying like 40-foot Harley-Davidson signs from motorcycle dealerships and shipping them across the country and selling them for like ten grand. So you can do some really interesting stuff with flipping. It’s this interesting world and it’s an interesting way to make a little side income that’s kind of accessible for anyone.
It’s not going to make you into a millionaire, but you can make a couple hundred bucks here and there just off junk you have lying around. It adds up.
Sam’s Founder Story: eBay in High School [00:02:00]
Sam: It reminds me of — our founder Sam talks about how he got his start as an entrepreneur when he was a teenager, in high school. He went on eBay and Craigslist and sold stuff. He did this thing where he approached graduating seniors on the baseball team and bought their equipment for not much money, because he knew they weren’t going to keep playing baseball. Then he sold it on eBay.
It’s the kind of thing I think people at any level could do, and especially now it’s more relevant than ever with people being out of work and needing some side income.
Why Right Now Is a Good Time to Start Flipping [00:03:00]
Zach: Yeah, and another thing about the current moment is a lot of thrift shops are still closed, so more people are cleaning out their homes than ever before right now. You have this huge amount of excess stuff that people are getting rid of, but there’s nowhere for it to go.
I go for a run every day, and I even see it around here outside of San Francisco — there’s just a ton of stuff sitting on the sidewalk that people are throwing away because they can’t bring it to thrift stores.
One thing Rob recommends: sometimes there’s no demand for something locally, so people will give it away for free on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. You can take those items — where there’s no local demand — and put them on eBay, where there’s a national demand. Suddenly you have a potential pool of 160 million people to sell something to, and there’s always someone out there looking for something.
Sam: In our house it’s baseball cards and basketball cards, things like that. So Mike’s into collectibles. I’m sure there’s a big market for all kinds of different products.
The Craziest Flip: A Prosthetic Leg [00:05:00]
Sam: What’s the craziest thing you heard that he’s flipped?
Zach: Let’s see. He told me a story about how he flipped a prosthetic leg. He went to this flea market and there was a guy who had found this prosthetic leg at an estate sale and had no idea what it was — was kind of creeped out by it and just wanted to get rid of it. So Rob bought it for like 30 bucks.
It turns out it was this incredibly fancy, really high-end prosthetic, and he put it on eBay and someone bought it — and maybe they flipped it for ten thousand. It was worth somewhere around ten grand. So yeah, pretty nuts what people find.
Sam: Fascinating. Well, I look forward to hearing more about it in the Sunday email that’s going to come out in a few days. Thanks for joining, Zach.
Zach: Yeah, thanks.