Swing open the doors to the lunie bin - A&E and its once successful “Flip this House” show have completely lost their mind! I’m not sure who is doing the hiring at this television but I can tell you that they are not picking the sharpest blades in the box to run this TV show.

Just when I thought that a storyline consisting of three Yale graduates sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber during office hours was as idiotic as it could get, A&E tops itself yet again with a record breaking moronic episode. In this “nugget of wisdom”, Armando Montelongo “has the most aggressive real estate investment company in Texas” (even though he just created it about a month ago) and will show America yet again how to flip a house for a profit.

The Episode
As the story goes, Armando’s intern has found a house in a full page newspaper ad that is in his own words “a steal” - The asking price on the home is $260,000 and its value is $310,000 with just $5,000 in repairs needed. He pitches the deal to Armando “The Guru” Montelongo, who has his own ideas. He decides that will will spend $45,000 to fix up the property instead and sell it for $375,000 and make a hundred grand. Part of the extra repairs he has in mind is a cobblestone driveway.  This is just the beginning of the madness. The entire show comes across scripted and mechanical with the intern painting a room a canary color when he was told to paint it neutral. I do understand this is a TV show and they are trying to create drama that might not be there, but watching this show I feel like I cannot roll my eyes back far enough. After the intern gets discouraged, in an attempt to make him feel better Armando drives him around town and shows him a series of homes that were featured in the last season (about half of them) that didn’t turn out as they were portrayed during the show. One of them was still in the market as the deal had not gone through while another they had to rent out since it was not selling. On a third property they made only about 50% of what they claimed in the show.

This is  wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin.

First, this property was found on a full page newspaper advertising, which tells me that it is surely listed on the MLS. That would mean that the lender underwriting the loan for the buyer of this home would have a value reference for how much the seller has paid for the property. Am I expected to believe that any lender would not question this deal and request documentation for such an abrupt increase in value? This is unbelievable. Without looking at any market information or sold comparables this “genius” predicts that he can sell a property for $375k (15%
higher value) for a home by simply adding cobblestone to a driveway?!
Clearly anybody that has been in a real estate business for a week can
tell you that this simply doesn’t add up.

Second, I understand that  A&E it going into damage control mode after the Leccima story broke out on a Fox News affiliate in Atlanta and they are trying to weave it into the story so it appears natural. But doesn’t this confirm the idea that this guy is utterly incompetent? I normally would not even waste my breath with a su-reality TV show but when a show like this inspires large number of regular people to go out there and flip houses like Mr Montelongo does, I feel like I must say something. How can one claim that they are an authority on a certain subject if half of the shows they’ve done have been unsuccessful? If you or I, working in any job, got half of what we did wrong, we would be fired on the spot.

A&E and “Flip this house” has lost its mind! I think at this point, this show has become like the movie “Gigli” and people watch it to see how bad it is this time.

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