On this episode of House Flip Masters Holly is joined by guest Andrea Arciga. Andrea is a broker from Irvine, California who has ventured into real estate investing by doing a handful of wholesales and now she is here to share with us. Andrea shares that her most important job is being the mother to 4 children ages spanning from 13 to 24. She also shares that she has been working since the age of 16 and that she has always been in some sort of sales role during her time in the workforce. Andrea was in the tech world until shortly after September 11th when she was laid off, during her time in the tech industry Andrea shares that she taught herself a lot of graphic design and such to stay within her advertising budget at her position. With the graphic design knowledge Andrea created postcards which were used for direct mailing. Andrea shares that after she was laid off a friend, Tina Estrada, who was a Caldwell Banker franchise owner asked her to come in and to help break Andrea into the real estate market. Andrea helped to get Tina going and they got 3 deals together. Shortly after Tina’s husband offered to show Andrea how lending works. Andrea says that she started working with other agents, by helping to brand them for their loans and that is how she got her break into the real estate world. Andrea did loans for about 5 years, and after that was when the bubble burst where she continued to work on loans for another 3 or 4 years. When the market crashed, Andrea got involved and was a founding board member of a group to help teach families how to keep their homes during that terrible time when so many people were losing their homes and ending up homeless. Andrea says that while she did do some retail real estate it was not something that she loved to do but there was a time when it was her bread and butter. When the market crashed Andrea saw the error in her ways by living high on the hog and not saving money while there was money to be had. While a lot of her friends, after the crash, went out and got jobs again in the corporate world Andrea kept fighting the real estate fight because she knew that she was not going back to a corporate job. When real estate began to dry up again for Andrea she knew that she had to reinvent herself again and that is when built herself a brokerage in Belmont Shore, California. Fast forward to now Andrea says that she took the 60-day challenge with Invest Club for Women with Iris. Andrea credits Iris for teaching her how to be a real estate investor. Because of her past and having experienced losing a home Andrea decided that she wanted to be in the business of helping people who are in a time of distress or need to sell their homes quickly for whatever reason. Andrea says that she hopes that people see from her story that it is okay to reinvent yourself time and time again when things are not going exactly as planned; and in doing so you can make a lot of money.   Today’s show features a little different formatting than what listeners are accustom to. Instead of Holly asking questions, Andrea will be asking Holly questions since Holly has a bit more experience in real estate investing. Today’s show will be somewhat of a coaching call where Andrea and listeners can gain insight from Holly’s years of real estate investing experience. Andrea’s first question to Holly is about when Holly gets into a contract when she knows she is ready to fix and flip a home, what do the first 5 days look like for this contract; start to finish. Holly shares that first there are the non-physical stuff such as checking titles and such. On the physical aspect of the deal Holly and/or her husband will go and check the home out and see if there are things that need to be fixed, opportunities to change different areas of the structure. Holly shares that in the beginning it is common for flippers to have contractors go and look at the property and get several bids on the things that need to