Flipper Investments named fastest growing company in New Orleans for 2022
Amid a slow down in the economy, higher financing costs, and mounting fears of a recession, real estate values are fast declining. But the downturn is a massive opportunity for investors who stick with their real estate holdings — or double down — during the downturn.
In fact, according to the latest report from Cohen & Steers, superior returns in real estate tend to follow recessionary periods.
That’s been the business methodology employed by Flipper’s 4 founders, who have grown the company portfolio to be worth $16.7 million — a growth spurt of more than 6,100% over the previous fifteen months.
The real estate investment company set out to “fundamentally change the home sale process,” and its doing just that.
Flipper’s growth story is eerily reminiscent of the illustrious companies that came out of Silicon Valley almost twenty years ago, just before the year y2k.
See, the Valley used to be the center of distilled entrepreneurial energy. Its ethos was simple: If it’s not new, it’s not cool; if it’s not cool, it’s not worth doing. If you don’t own shares, you’re getting screwed. If you haven’t been through an IPO, you’re a virgin. The Valley was where a $2 million house was considered a teardown. It was where a Porsche was seen as just another compact car and sushi as just another fast food.
And honestly? If you close your eyes in New Orleans right now, it feels an awful lot like Silicon Valley in 1999, with that giddy, amazing, lost moment when you’re at the most important place on Earth and just about everyone in it is happily adding a zero or two to his or her net worth.
That’s how it feels in Flipper’s office, anyway. The pure combination of excitement, avarice, and ambition, is enough to make anybody do a double take.
Creating a “hot” growth company involves a kind of alchemy that no one has yet developed into a science. In general, the biggest “plays,” as they are invariably referred to by the people who think of themselves as movers, are more about money than about ideas. Ideas are plentiful, but getting behemoth real estate companies like Flipper off the ground is largely dependent on getting backing from investors who are able to pour millions of dollars into and lend their credibility to a new enterprise.
Investors do not usually back ideas; far more often they back teams — sometimes managers, sometimes engineers — that they think will be able to “execute.” Finding the right team is an almost obsessive concern.
One walk through Flipper’s office and you can instantly identify the bravado and overwhelming confidence that investors seem to like about the hotshot real estate firm — but by the traditional standards of corporate America, it was a dismal showing.
And yet, put simply, it just doesn’t matter, because what matters in traditional corporations is not what matters in a start-up. In start-ups, ego wins.
The combination of ego and confidence might prove to be the winning formula for Flipper Investments; or, it might be their perfectly timed conquest of New Orleans real estate. Are they the next big thing? Who knows. As long as they keep doing what they’re doing, I’m sure they’ll be just fine.
