Sitting in her cozy 1950s home-turned-Airbnb on Church Street, Gigi Kinsey calls it her favorite of all the houses she has flipped over the last two years. “[My husband Doug and I] actually come here sometimes after we have dinner on the Square. It is just the warmest, most inviting little house, and we get excited for our guests to come and appreciate it.”
From interior designer to house flipper and now author, Gigi hopes her success story empowers other women to gain the kind of financial freedom that ultimately leads to a legacy of generational wealth.
REAL ESTATE ADVENTURE
When Gigi began flipping houses in 2021, she found herself in a segment of the real estate industry that was still “a good old boys club with women few and far between.” As such, inspiring more women to join the real estate world is one of the goals of her new book, A Woman’s Guide to House Flipping: Creating a 6-Figure Income Now & Generational Wealth for the Future. She says, “My vision is to see a movement of modern-day Proverbs 31 women who ‘consider fields and buy them’ and who ‘see to it that their trading is profitable.’ ”
Her own experience flipping houses—buying, rehabbing, and reselling a house—began on the day Winter Storm Uri hit Texas. She and her husband were checking out a residence and, despite a rocky start followed by renovation challenges and a year-long process, her first house flipping project was a success that earned her nearly $100,000. “I realized this was an opportunity for women just like me,” Gigi says. “There are not many opportunities for women to make that kind of big money. This is true especially if they have families, or perhaps they have been taking a corporate salary for 30 years and don’t realize they can grab a hold of that and make a lot of money flipping.”
THE BOOK
A Woman’s Guide to House Flipping is full of success stories like Gigi’s—“women in different seasons of life in different situations in different areas of the country who were all able to flip a house successfully,” she says. “I don’t care who you are, you can get into real estate investing.”
Throughout the book, she shares house flipping tips, including a rehabbing checklist and the Golden Formula for flipping. “The whole point is to try and make it as simple and informative as possible, step by step, from the perspective of a person who is used to rehab, to someone who has never done one.”
Gigi is already planning her next book, in which she will share the formula for buying residential properties to build a real estate portfolio, as well as how to buy, rehab, and then decide what kind of rental it should be—long-, mid-, or short-term. “Many are interested in Airbnbs and I’ll be discussing that a great deal. Basically, the book will teach people to use real estate to earn income now, and build wealth for the future.”