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When a car gets stolen, the insurance company analyzes whether the car is a total loss or not. While browsing Copart.com, I stumbled upon one of these cars. It was a 2004 Jeep Wrangler with 98,000 miles that clearly looked like it was a theft recovery. The car was listed as a non-running vehicle, so I decided to go in person and checked it out beforehand. There were a few things that immediately stood out. The ignition cylinder was absolutely shattered, the interior looked like it had seen better days and as I expected the catalytic converter was cut off.
Needless to say, although the car did not run or drive, I still decided to place a bid on it.
After going back and forth during the live auction, I ended up winning it for $5,200.
Coincidentally, my friend Vadim with Broadway Towing, which you might remember from my last flip, was at the lot as well, so he volunteered to try to start it for me for the first time.
A week or so after the Jeep arrived at the shop, the mechanic gave me a call and told me to stop at the shop to see everything that was wrong with it.
The rear right tire was going flat so I knew that I would have to address that sooner rather than later. Also before I arrived, the mechanic told me that the ignition cylinder was severely damaged so the whole steering wheel column had to be replaced. After arriving at the shop, the mechanic showed me what else he found. To start off, he mentioned that the thieves who stole the car, instead of cutting the catalytic converters they ended up cutting off the muffler. It seemed like the prior owner was a big fan of off-roading since there was a lot of dirt everywhere underneath the car. One last thing that the mechanic mentioned was the issue with the radiator.
So the new radiator was installed and the steering wheel column was replaced as mentioned earlier. The total tab for those repairs were $1,140. The shop did let me know that their welder was not going to be in town for a while so they referred me to a different shop to get that muffler welded.
As I was planning to head out to pick up the rear seat, I was fortunate enough to have my father in law reach out to me and offer to go pick up the seat for me. That saved me a ton of time. Although that ended up saving me a lot of time, I ended up placing this Jeep on the backburner and it sat in my garage while I worked on a few of my other projects.
I ended up purchasing the soft top from roughcountry.com.
Although the jeep was finally detailed, I still needed to restore the trim on the car because it was severely faded. I ended up trying out the trim cubes by lithium that Buddy DIY uses on his channel and let me tell you, I was fairly impressed.
With the trim restored, I went ahead and threw it up on Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp. While I was selling it, I decided to put some miles on it and that is when something unfortunate happened. As I was heading out onto the freeway one evening, it was a bit rainy out and I… well I spun out of control and hit a wooden sign, which caused a pretty big dent in the front right fender. To be honest, it could have been much worse because the sound of me hitting the wooden sign caused me to think that the wheel along with the axle was toast. Thank God everything turned out better than what could have been.
Through the whole process of selling it, I had 2 serious clients stop by. The first one after analyzing all the cosmetic damages offered $9,500 which I declined since I had just posted it a few days prior.
After 4-5 weeks of having no serious clients, I had a father and son make an hour and a half drive to stop by and check it out. At that point I had it listed for $10,450, but since it had been listed for sale for over a month I decided that my bottom price was going to be $9,500 after all. After giving a car a thorough inspection, they came at me with a $9,000 offer. I was straightforward with them and told them that my absolute bottom dollar is $9,500 after which they agreed. We shook hands, signed the paperwork and the deal was finally complete.
So let’s break down the numbers. The winning bid for the car was $5,200. After all the fees and repairs, the Jeep ended up costing me $8,313.73. That left me with a profit of $1,186.27. Due to unforeseen repairs like replacing the radiator and obviously me damaging the car, the actual profit was a bit lower than the projected.
I spent a total of 6.5 hours repairing along with a few hours of showing it to clients and selling it.
That brought my hourly rate to $139.56 an hour.
I got a ton more car flips coming soon. Stay tuned and I’ll see you in the next one.
My videos are not financial advice so please take it as a grain of salt. I hope you have a good laugh out of it as well. Enjoy the video and please share your feedback, like, and subscribe!
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