How to flip couches is a widely known semi-passive income strategy. It is most likely one of the ideas you have had to start a side gig and a few extra bucks alongside your day job.
It can be grind to get started, but once you have the knowledge down on how to flip couches, it can be a highly profitable side hustle. Here is how to flip couches to make money.
What You’ll Need
In order to start flipping, you will need a few different services and materials to get started:
- Vehicle for transporting a couch.
- Cleaning supplies that is fabric friendly. I recommend the Bissell Little Green Multi-Purpose Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaner.
- Large enough storage to have the couch.
- A Facebook Marketplace, craigslist, or another seller service like Mercari.
- Access to a camera and a nice set up for photos.
I would recommend if you have a smaller car to pursue a different business unless you really want to invest into paying for deliveries. This can be difficult, as many of the couches you will be buying from sellers online will not be willing to do so and you may be finding yourself renting a UHaul pretty often.
After you have all of this set, move to the buying process.
How to Buy
When buying to then eventually see how you can flip couches, you want to get the best deals. That doesn’t necessarily mean free or lowest price. It means a buy you can make a profit on.
When you buy on Mercari for example (use the Undepaids link to get you an extra $10 when you make an account), you can search for couches with free shipping using filters. Here is a sofa and loveseat the I found, both for the price o $200.
When you find these two for one deals, this is usually a sign that someone is wanting to get rid of them to replace or has to move to a new location. In either situation, they see low value in keeping the sofas.
That is where you can come in and buy on the cheap, then sell for a profit. Let’s see how much this could make us after cleaning.
You want to know how much these couches are as new. So go through the available photos to look for tags. If there are no tags, look up similar couches online with their description. Be careful to make sure to compare if the couches can recline or not.
In this case, this couch and loveseat did not have any company tags in the pictures, so I went and searched for a brown sofa and loveseat set. It need not be exact, but make it a comparable product.
I found this set on Houzz that looks pretty similar to the set on Mercari.
So we are looking at a potential value of around $600-$1,100 for how the set was when it was originally bought. Now you want make it good as new.
How to Flip Couches: Cleaning
Cleaning is going to be an important task for you do complete to make your product to sell worthwhile to your customer.
To clean, you can use the recommended Bissell Little Green Multi-Purpose Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaner. When using this, any stains you see in the couch you can spray the cleaner and then suck up with the machine. If you need to see how to use it, see this video here.
Depending the condition of the couch, I would recommend going section by section with the whole couch to make it as clean as possible. Clean out underneath the cushions and cracks as well to remove what may gathered under it.
Photos (not selling yet)
Taking selling photos is half the battle when it comes to how to flip couches. If you do not have good photos, your couch will not sell at a good price. It is as simple as that.
To get some good photos, free and empty wall space with a few decor items is always a good go to.
The one on the right is much more eye catching. The one of the left more so just looks like a boring couch.
In order to get the best price point out of your couch flip, getting good photos is vitally important.
How to Flip Couches: Selling
Selling the couch will be difficult at first because you don’t know your market. You will have an easier time with selling on Facebook Marketplace more than most any platform. Mercari is sometimes good for finds because not many people shop there for couches.
This couch here has the best photo. It also has the highest price attached on Facebook Marketplace.
When you have identified similarly made items, look at the price and look at the photo. Take the average price you are seeing on a used, like-new couch, as that is the standard you want to have with your buys and cleanings.
Looking at the prices online, I would guess you could flip this loveseat and sofa set for $699 if done right, making you abut a $500 profit minus other expenses.
Put the photos on FB Marketplace with the best photo for the thumbnail and watch the sale happen.
If you need to scale this, some other websites such as Ivy Flip and Furniture Flippers 2.0 for more resources.
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