House Talk February 16, 2025

Show: House Talk on News Radio WHAM 1180
Hosts: Jeff Schofield, Mike Reed
Guest: Deb Cleveland — Real Estate Investor & Coach
Duration: 44:36

Episode Summary

In this episode of House Talk, hosts Jeff Schofield and Mike Reed are joined by special guest Deb Cleveland, a Rochester-area real estate investor with nearly four decades of experience and over 400 renovations completed. Deb shares her origin story — starting as a single parent with no money, buying her first rundown row house in Rochester’s Maplewood area, and building a $2 million company out of a spare bedroom within five years. She walks through how to find off-market deals through unconventional networking, how to finance a first property without a bank, the critical difference between fix-and-flip and long-term rental wealth building, her approach to community transformation in Geneva, NY, her coaching programs and upcoming book, and a detailed breakdown of her renovation philosophy including warm color palettes, the two-sheen hardware rule, and why she never follows trends.

Key Discussion Points

• How Deb started with zero money as a single parent — her first $9,000 profit and how it grew to a $2M business in five years

• Why straight-commission sales is the best training ground before starting any business

• How to finance a first investment property using personal trust and private lenders — not banks

• Unconventional networking for off-market deals: utility workers, funeral directors, estate attorneys, insurance agents

• Fix-and-flip vs. rental wealth building — two completely different businesses with different strategies

• How to build a $1M+ rental portfolio in Upstate NY with just 6–7 single-family homes on 15-year mortgages

• Specializing in one market: 129 renovations in Geneva, NY over 13 years and the community impact

• How Deb owner-financed homes for long-term tenants post-COVID with no money down

• Coaching programs: GPS Course (Greatness Potentiation System), Just Do One for Fun, Millionaires in the Making

• Renovation palette: warm vinyls, whitetail paint, ceiling color as differentiator — no trendy grays

• The two-sheen hardware rule: pick two finishes and use them throughout the entire house

• The monochromatic paint technique — same color, different sheens — and why it adds perceived luxury

• How to hire a decorator once ($300–$400) and use the same signature look on every flip

Full Transcript

[0:02] Announcer: Welcome to House Talk on News Radio WHAM 1180\. This show is a weekly conversation about all the things you should know when buying, selling, or maintaining your home. Join in with your comments or questions. Call or text 222-1180 or +1 802-951-180. Now live from the News Radio WHAM 1180 studio in downtown Rochester. Here are your hosts, Jeff Schofield, Mike Reed, and real estate attorney, John Marchioni.

[0:34] Jeff Schofield: Welcome back, everyone. This is Jeff Schofield with House Talk. With me, I’ve got Mike Reed. And we’ve got a special guest, Deb Cleveland. Deb, are you there?

[0:44] Deb Cleveland: I am. Hey, Jeff.

[0:46] Jeff Schofield: I appreciate your calling in. And John’s in Florida. I feel bad for him. Well, actually, I think Deb’s in Florida too.

[0:59] Mike Reed: I don’t feel bad. Smart investors—

[1:01] Deb Cleveland: —head to Florida.

[1:02] Jeff Schofield: That’s right. Well, what I want to do is ask folks, if you have questions, you’re welcome to text me at area code (585) 600-5333. I want to get through some material with Deb. Just to give a prelude — I’ve known Deb for a while now. I think I was told by a mutual friend that you went into real estate after having another business and just decided you wanted to do real estate. And Deb is a monster at the fix-and-flip and fix-and-keep. I mean, she’s not doing one or two. It’s a business for her, and she’s been very good at it, very successful. Deb, why don’t you tell us a little bit how you got into it?

[1:58] Deb Cleveland: Yeah, wow. It’s a great question. I’ve been a real estate investor and fixer and flipper for almost four decades. And when I started — the reason I’m so passionate about talking about this — is that hopefully there are people, listeners on this call, that are saying, I don’t have the money. I don’t have the experience. I don’t know how to hire contractors. I didn’t know any of that either. I was a single parent, no money, no education, and I started a tiny business out of my spare bedroom. I bought a rundown row house in the Maplewood area, hired my dad, Norm, for $8 an hour, and we fixed it up, sold it, and I made $9,000. I thought I was the richest woman in the world. And that small business that I started out of my spare bedroom, within a five-year period, it grew into a $2,000,000 company. And I did that while single parenting and raising my son and also working a straight-commission job. So it was a commitment. It was a lot of work. But I can say the foundation for me was — when you are a straight-commission salesperson, you really are in business for yourself. So I really encourage people: if they want to know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur before they’re an entrepreneur, find a product or a company or a service that you really love and work straight commission for them. It will give you a solid foundation to start your business.

[3:35] Mike Reed: I was able to — yeah. Hey, Deb. This is Mike with All County Inspection Services. I had that conversation with my wife just yesterday. We were talking about where we’re going, careers, and things like that. And I said, I think my favorite part about this job and owning a company is waking up unemployed every day — feeling like every day I have to go out and make something happen today. I never felt that way when I worked in the corporate world. I felt like I was working really hard, but I never felt like I was making something happen. And this way, I feel like I’ve got to do this thing for me and my family. It’s absolutely amazing to get involved in a place where it’s a straight-commission thing. If you don’t work and you aren’t successful, you don’t get paid. It’s an amazing feeling.

[4:17] Deb Cleveland: Yeah, I agree. There’s nothing like it. It’s so meaningful, and it’s very gratifying, and it’s incredibly profitable. I mean, I was able to retire from the real estate investing business, which I planned — and that’s something I teach clients: put together a solid foundation of information and have a solid plan in place before you begin. If you want to retire in the next 18 years and you want to do it with rental properties, then how many units do you need to purchase? How many homes do you need to buy? Within what time period? It only takes 15-year mortgages. So when you look 18 years out — because if it takes three years to accumulate that inventory, now you’re sitting on millions of dollars that’s paid off — and then you can write your own life as far as, what do you want to do now? What do you want to do next? That’s what I did. That’s why I retired so young.

[5:13] Jeff Schofield: Well, one of the things that I like about this show is we talk about different things for investments. I mean, every time I go to Wegmans or you stop at a store and you see somebody who’s obviously in their mid to late seventies, even early eighties, pushing shopping carts in the parking lot — everybody is so ill-prepared for retirement now because all the big companies have given up their retirement plans. And I think everybody under-saves. So this is really a nice way to — even if you’re not building your own wealth, you can build an income stream. If you take the average person working at ABC company doing minimum wage, which is $16 an hour now, and they’re able to orchestrate — hopefully you’re going to help explain how — to do a flip. Buy a house, flip it, make $10,000 on it. It’s the equivalent of them working 20 hours a week for 31 weeks. And sometimes you ring the bell and you make over $10,000.

[6:20] Deb Cleveland: And it’s interesting the segue into how do you start, because that is the number one question I get when I interview someone for potentially working with me. They don’t know where to begin. They don’t know how to finance a property. I did not have any money when I started, so I’m a really good person to talk to about that. The first thing I tell people is: are you a trustworthy person? Do people trust you? Because if you don’t have that inside of you, almost any business is difficult — but especially real estate. What I did was I went to my old boss, Bill Shaver, and I said, hey Bill, I want to buy this building. It was my first investment property on the corner of Comfort and South Avenue. Because I’d worked for him, he knew me. He knew that I was responsible, committed, and dedicated — and he lent me the money. He wrote me a check for $62,000. It was 15% interest, and I had to pay it back in five years. The numbers were really tight on that acquisition because the cash flow wasn’t covering the full amount, but it didn’t matter because I would never have been able to buy it otherwise. I heard some people say, the interest rate is too high. I said, okay, so are you breaking even on this rental? Because if you’re building wealth, yes, it’s great to make cash flow, and you need to make enough cash flow to maintain the property. But if you’re working another job or you’re fixing and flipping houses for cash flow, you don’t necessarily need to get it out of the property until you retire. And Jeff, they don’t really need that many properties. One of my courses is called Millionaires in the Making, A Sacred Path to Riches — and that’s about women who want to build at least a million-dollar real estate portfolio. In Upstate New York, in some of these smaller fringe markets, you only really have to buy six or seven single-family houses, take care of them, take care of your tenant, and you’ll end up with a million-dollar real estate portfolio or more at the end of that 15th year if you pay up the mortgage.

[8:41] Jeff Schofield: Nice.

[8:43] Jeff Schofield: Deb, you’ve done — I mean, you’ve used this — what I did 35 years ago. I would buy properties, fix and flip, not to the remotely the extent that you or even Mike have done. And then I would buy rental properties. Eventually, I just gravitated away from that until recently I’ve gravitated back to doing it a little bit more. How do you find the properties that you’re buying?

[9:12] Deb Cleveland: That’s a great question. So you network like crazy. It’s again the mindset of the business owner or straight-commission salesperson. At the time, I made up a stack of 250 business cards — and I know it sounds very old-fashioned, but some of the old-fashioned things still work. Every single week, my whole game was: I’m going to give all these away this week, then I’m going to get 250 new cards. And every time I talk to someone, I’m going to say, remember me if you run into someone or you hear of somebody that’s in trouble with their property. And it just gets the wheel going. People start calling you. And then I go really rogue — I talk to funeral directors, I talk to attorneys, insurance agents, and the utility guys are great ones because they’re almost the first ones in when somebody’s in trouble. They haven’t paid their bill and they’re there to turn off the utility. So if you become friendly with the utility person and say, hey, could you let me know if you know of a property that’s in distress? You’ve gone in and turned off the gas, the electric, and the water. Because that’s the person that’s going to call me to say, hey, this person is in distress. Can you help them out? At this point, Jeff, for me — I call them mercy runs. I get calls almost every week from somebody that says, are you that girl? And I say, I think so — what’s going on? So they tell me the challenges they’re in. They’ve lost their job. Many of these folks won’t list these properties with real estate agents because they’re so embarrassed. They’re embarrassed that they either got ill, they got old, they have deferred maintenance. And this way, they can quietly sell the property.

[11:07] Deb Cleveland: I want to segue, Jeff, if I can — into more or less focusing on the fix-and-flip business. How does that sound?

[11:17] Jeff Schofield: Yeah, perfect.

[11:21] Mike Reed: First question I have — I’ve done a couple of houses for myself and I’m toying with the idea of some more right now, but I’ve got a couple of other business ventures going. The first question I’ve always had is the dynamic between buying a house in, say, nicer areas of the city — not quite nice, maybe North Winton Village, something off Park Ave — versus going to a neglected part of the city and fixing that up, or going higher-end: Victor, Pittsford, Mendon, Bloomfield. Where have you found the most success?

[12:03] Deb Cleveland: Great question. So I tried different things, and I became masterful at flipping multi-units, which is a kind of specialty. But where my heart really is — what I really love to do — is fixing and flipping to the first-time homebuyer market. So I focus on that market. When I buy the house, I think about the woman that’s going to walk through that kitchen. I give her and her family the nicest house I can at the most affordable price — warm and welcoming and completely renovated. I used to do a lot in Rochester. I’ve done over 400 renovations. After I had retired, I really want to talk to the lone wolf retired women out there — women that are really responsible, really independent. When retirement hits for these gals, it’s like a truck hit them because they didn’t realize how much they really enjoyed their work family. And now during retirement, they’re suffering. A lot of them are do-it-yourselfers, so they would be a perfect fit for this program I have coming up. It’s called Just Do One for Fun. And when I work with them, I have them focus on the first-time homebuyer market as well. No matter what market you go into, you’re going to find the first-time homebuyer section of that town, that city, that community. You just have to look around at demographics. In Rochester, the first-time homebuyer market kind of dried up because there were so many real estate investors — about 20 years ago. So I started looking at what are the outlier communities where investors aren’t looking right now. And I ended up, after the 2008 crash, in Geneva, New York. I focused on Geneva and became masterful at it. And that’s what I tell people: when you become an expert in an area and a specific demographic, stay in it. Stay in your lane. Become masterful at it. I stayed in Geneva, New York, and I did over 129 renovations there within 13 years.

[14:27] Mike Reed: Wow. That’s a lot of renovations in a town that size.

[14:32] Deb Cleveland: Yeah, I mean, there’s only 12,000 people. And what I noticed when I got there was a lot of slumlords, a lot of poor landlording going on, especially after the crash. What they really needed was to stabilize that community. And what they did in Geneva, New York — it would be beautiful if it got replicated in other smaller towns and cities. We had great government come in. They went to Cornell and hired some students doing their theses on urban renewal. And collectively — there were really only five investors: myself and four others — we put our heads down, put our heads together, put our hearts, our backs, and our money into it. I’d say collectively between the five of us, we did over 400 units in that city.

[15:36] Mike Reed: Wow. That’s a lot.

[15:39] Deb Cleveland: We recognized that we were losing two demographics. We were losing retirees because they no longer wanted to maintain a house — and in Geneva there were no condos they could buy, and they didn’t want to be renters. So we lost those folks to Canandaigua where there were condos. But the issue we were able to fix was that we had a lot of first-time homebuyers who wanted to buy houses in Geneva, and the inventory was so old and dated that young couples with college tuitions and kids in tow wanted to live there, but they didn’t have the talent or funds or interest in fixing and flipping a house. As an investor, if you really get educated in this business, you can spot those areas. You can see: how can I really make a difference, and how can this be meaningful for me? It’s not just about making money — it’s really about making a difference.

[16:44] Mike Reed: Yeah. I’ve had a thought in my head for a long time, and I’m glad you’re on the show. Everybody I talk to tells me I’m crazy, but they’ve never done this. As an inspector — and we don’t just do home inspections, we do pretty much everything — I see a lot of people who want to move out of their houses. They’re in the Fairports, the Perintons, parts of Greece, North Greece. They’ve got that four-bedroom on a cul-de-sac they moved into in 1990, and they’re ready to move out. Their kids have aged out. Their grandkids. They’re looking for a one- or two-bedroom small house. I’ve wanted to find some of these smaller communities — like small houses in Irondequoit, a thousand to 1,200 square feet — meet with people and say, look, I’ll secure the property, I’ll buy it, but you contract out with me to remodel it the way you want it. We’ll work through that together, working off my initial investment, and then it gets refinanced into their name. Because I see a lot of flips where you go into a house and two weeks later those brand new cupboards are in the dumpster. People bought that house because they needed to secure the property, but they didn’t like what was in it. Do you think that’s a crazy idea?

[18:36] Deb Cleveland: I think you’re working too hard.

[18:39] Jeff Schofield: I’m kind of in that ballpark. I would just—

[18:42] Deb Cleveland: Go and do it.

[18:42] Jeff Schofield: Do it yourself. Do it and sell it.

[18:45] Deb Cleveland: People approach me all the time to do what you’re saying, Mike, and I would never renovate for somebody else. I’ve got really good taste and a really good eye for decor, so I give them a high-end decorator look. I’ve never seen anybody tear out what I’ve done. They might repaint a color, but I’m very neutral. I don’t do trendy things because I want the investment they make to look kind of timeless. They can add some of their own things to bring their personality in. I would just run from that. It’s not as profitable. It’s a lot more work. You’re dealing with a buyer that you’re kind of held hostage by.

[19:42] Jeff Schofield: And we’re back. House Talk with a special guest, Deb Cleveland. Deb, what I want you to do is — I wish I had known you 40 years ago. I mean, of course, you probably didn’t have the knowledge base you do now, but it would have been great. You were nice enough to send me a pre-copy of the book you have coming out. I love that book. I’ll be buying it to give to clients. You offer coaching, your book, your training — we can get back on the air when your book’s actually published. But tell us about the coaching services, and you mentioned to me off-air about a master class you’ve got going on.

[20:45] Deb Cleveland: Thank you. So what I like to do with clients is help them get their foundation down. The first question I ask is: do they want to fix and flip, or do they want to build wealth and passive income? Because they’re two different avenues. They’re not the same. Fix-and-flip is about making money. You’re not a real estate investor if you’re fixing and flipping — but it’s a great way to make money. The challenge I found is that when I’ve taught people how to fix and flip, they never — and I rarely use that word — they never transitioned over into building wealth with rental properties, because it really becomes kind of addictive. You make good money. It’s fun. It’s quick. Building with rentals and making passive income for legacy or retirement is a very different business. When I work with clients, they get clear with me about what they want. The retirees I’m working with right now just want to do one for fun — and that’s what inspired me to write the book, because the book is basically a tutorial for them. It tells them exactly the steps they need to take, what they need to know, how to price out labor, how to find labor, how to create that decorator log — all the steps, the 12 different stages they’ll go through when they fix and flip a property. I call this the Greatness Potentiation System, or GPS course, which is where they build a solid foundation. That’s just the first six weeks of a course, and I’m actually giving it away for free when I get it launched in the next couple of months. That’s where they put their stake in the ground. They’ll get clear about how many flips they want to do. Many of the retirees just want to do one for fun. Once they learn the business, it usually takes them three to six months to get their teeth sunk into it. They do one, then they might do two a year, or one year after year. Several of those clients decided to keep going because they enjoyed it so much. I’m in Florida right now, and everybody here is into pickleball and tennis — but there are a lot of people who don’t want to play tennis and pickleball. For them, getting back out into the community and doing something they really love — these are the do-it-yourselfers. The same GPS course is where I’ve built sustainable, profitable, long-term businesses. My first business I had for 16 years, started it out of my spare bedroom, built it into a $2,000,000 company — all using this GPS system. So when I work with somebody who wants to build a rental wealth portfolio, my first question is: what is your overall financial objective? Usually, that trips them up because they don’t even understand what I’m asking. And I said, okay, do you want to build half a million, one million, five million? What’s the number? Where’s the road sign you’re heading toward? Because once they get that in their head, they own it. Like, okay, I’m going to build a $5,000,000 real estate portfolio. Now I have my number. How many units do you need to purchase to meet that objective? And I go into deep detail about what kind of tenant you want to serve, what type of property best suits that tenant. If somebody is passionate about college rentals, they need to buy housing near a college or university. I focus on the mid-to-low income earning couple with two kids, a pet in tow. That tenant moves into my single-family houses — and I really encourage my clients to invest in single-family houses, Jeff. Literally, I never get the maintenance call, and my average tenant stays in single-family houses for eight to twelve years. Because once a family gets in — they’ve got some stain on their credit, they can’t get a house, they get their kids in school, the kids get acclimated to the neighborhood — these are not A or B neighborhoods, these are C burgeoning neighborhoods. I go over how to spot these neighborhoods, how to find the tenant that’s a perfect match for that housing, and how to accumulate inventory right inside that pocket so you really make a difference. I bought 14 houses on one street in Geneva, New York, and then another eight houses around the corner. And right after COVID, I went to eight of my tenants who had been in those houses and helped me stabilize those areas. I said, how would you like to buy this house from me? I’ll owner-finance it for you. I don’t want any money down. You’ve helped me turn this neighborhood around. And oh my god, it was such a beautiful experience. It was a dream of mine to really make a difference in this neighborhood. And these tenants took a chance on me and the neighborhood because it wasn’t a stabilized B neighborhood — it was a struggling C neighborhood. But they knew me. They knew I was committed. Then I provided them with a gorgeous, renovated, completely done house. It was not rent-to-own. I don’t like rent-to-own, I don’t like lease-to-own. They rented from me anywhere from six to eight years, and then I went to them and said, would you like to buy the property from me?

[27:11] Jeff Schofield: When you sell them to the tenants, do you do financing, or do you hand-hold them to go through a bank?

[27:16] Deb Cleveland: I do financing myself. The reason they haven’t been able to buy a house is because they’ve got some sort of credit issue that’s old that they haven’t been able to fix. Sometimes it’s an old medical bill, or somebody stole their credit, or they just can’t seem to get their credit up to the point where they’re bankable. But I know them because they’ve been a tenant of mine for years — almost a decade or a little less. They’ve paid every month and they’ve taken care of the house like it is their home.

[27:53] Jeff Schofield: Deb, do you have any renovation staples you can share? One of the common things we’ve all found is that most people are putting in granite counters, new appliances, granite. What features do you find that when somebody walks in, they love? And what’s your viewpoint on that agreeable gray vinyl plank flooring, which is so popular?

[28:41] Mike Reed: I hate it. I’d rather paint the hardwood floors.

[28:48] Deb Cleveland: Oh my god, you’re so funny, Jeff. So I’m allergic to gray, white, and black pretty much. I never went in that direction. It was like — this is 40 years ago — it was hunter green and burgundy and mauve. Ew. That’s what everything was. So no, I did not jump on that bandwagon, and I don’t jump on any of those bandwagons. I would say — the tenants love color. If you learn about color and how it affects people, even if you just paint one room with a really warm — say the living room. I do a color block on a wall. I won’t maybe do the whole room. The other thing I’m known for is I paint ceilings with a beautiful silver strand gray, which is like a bluish gray, and it gives them this wow factor when they walk in because people don’t expect to see color on the ceiling. Or I’ll pick a really discerning hallway and do a beautiful dark navy blue on that ceiling. I am in love with vinyl planking, but I don’t like the colors that are in the gray family. I stay completely away from them. I look for warm ones — they have some cinnamon in them, some nutmeg colors, and some blonde. I don’t like totally blonde floors because that’s going to get dated very quickly. I don’t like gray cabinets. I mostly do whitetail throughout the house because it’s not white and it has enough cream to it that it looks luxurious. It has this real upscale look. I stay with flats on the walls — they’re easiest to touch up without flashing. And then I use standard semi-gloss on the trim and the doors. I get rid of the six-panel doors — I’m allergic to those too.

[30:53] Deb Cleveland: And then I do two-panel doors. I think they really — the tiny investment really gives an elevated look on a fixer flip or a rental.

[31:03] Jeff Schofield: That’s interesting. The two-panel doors. I guess we’re going out on our last break. Stay tuned. We’ll be back at 222-1180.

[31:36] Deb Cleveland: It’s www.debcleveland.com.

[31:43] Mike Reed: There we are. Cleveland’s like the city.

[31:47] Deb Cleveland: Like the city. Yeah.

[31:48] Mike Reed: And when we were going on, you were talking about your colors and things like that. We’re redesigning my house. I never can move into a place and leave it alone. We cannot figure out color schemes at all. My wife and I have been looking at what I think they call color washing — basically everything is the same color, just different sheens. Is that look good in real life?

[32:16] Deb Cleveland: I love that look.

[32:17] Mike Reed: I was going to say it looks good on my computer screen and on my phone. Like you pick a color, the ceiling is the same color as the trim, just eggshell on the walls, semi-gloss on the trim, and flat on the ceiling. Does it look good in real life?

[32:35] Deb Cleveland: Yes. That’s a very bespoke look. It’s a very subtle, high-end — that’s a fabulous way to really add value without really adding cost. That’s what I teach people — how to create a high-end look on a budget. When I work with first-time homebuyers, the budget is smaller than if I was working on a luxury flip. So that tiny thing you just said is not that tiny. That will really increase the value of any property because it looks so rich.

[33:09] Mike Reed: Now I have an expert telling me we should do this. My wife and I — god bless my wife — our floor has been OSB for a year with throw carpets over it because she just can’t decide on colors.

[33:31] Jeff Schofield: As long as you’ve been listening to this show, your problems might be over soon.

[33:34] Mike Reed: As long as she’s happy, I’m happy. The throw rugs are working.

[33:39] Deb Cleveland: Oh my god. That’s good.

[33:44] Mike Reed: Yeah, we have a house that we took the entire center wall out of, up on the Irondequoit Bay. You walk through the front door, look through the house, and it looks out through some big picture windows we put on the back. And now we just can’t seem to pull the trigger on finalizing everything because I think it’s paralysis by analysis. We keep looking at everything because we know that’s the final stage.

[34:06] Jeff Schofield: Well, you just keep waiting and what you have will probably come back into style soon.

[34:11] Mike Reed: Oh god, we don’t have a lot of time.

[34:17] Jeff Schofield: Deb, do you have some stuff that you’d really like to get out there? Any more key decorating and renovation tips? Because everything you do would help anybody getting their house ready to sell.

[34:34] Deb Cleveland: I would say if you’re getting a house ready to sell: paint it and neutralize the inside. If you’re living in the house you went with your colors, I would say use whitetail flat and paint the whole house. Just really neutralize it. Declutter your house. And the smallest things that make a big difference again are light fixtures — they’re not that much money. You could invest a small budget and it would really elevate the look of the house. Putting door pulls on kitchen cabinets. And I want to mention this — because this is where I see some really bad moves — I’ll walk into a house, like one of these flips by a flipper that failed. And when I walked in, I could immediately see why this person failed. They didn’t have a plan in place. The other thing: they had a complete mixture of sheens as far as door pulls. The door pulls were black matte. The doorknobs for the doors themselves were brushed nickel. They had some brushed — so if you want a high-end look, you stick with two sheens. You’re going to do chrome and black matte — that’s all you use throughout the whole house on your light fixtures, door pulls, doorknobs, anything that has a sheen to it, your faucet. If you want to do that yummy brushed gold, maybe you pair that with black matte, or maybe you pair that with nickel. But just stay with two sheens. The only exception is if you bring something in like a light fixture that has rattan on it or some sort of wood element — you can get away with that. But to really create the elevated decorator look, just stay with two sheens for your fixtures.

[36:31] Deb Cleveland: Well, what my—

[36:33] Jeff Schofield: When Deb’s talking about decoration, I feel like for her and me, it’s a men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus thing.

[36:39] Mike Reed: I hear the words, but I don’t know what they mean.

[36:41] Jeff Schofield: Note yourself. Google this later.

[36:44] Mike Reed: Well, my wife will ask me, what do you think about this color? And my response quite often is, honey, I try not to think about colors. I just don’t have a thought on them. You can put it on the wall. It’s kind of like art — you know what you like, and you have no idea why you don’t like what you don’t like.

[37:05] Jeff Schofield: But I will tell you, Deb — some of the flips you do, they look wonderful.

[37:18] Deb Cleveland: I want to say this: one of the challenges is that there are mostly men in the fix-and-flip business, and they do have challenges putting together a soft, warm, high-end decorator look. So for those guys, I would say: hire a decorator for three or four hundred dollars. Have her put together your whole signature look that you’re going to use on all your flips. You don’t have to change it every time. Just stick with this look and you’ll be solid. Don’t try to guess. Don’t go buying stuff on sale and mix and match things together because you’re trying to save yourself $500. It’s a really, really bad idea. So hire someone. Or go to Sherwin-Williams — they’ll help you pull colors together. I would hire a decorator and you might end up with two or three different schemes if you get bored of just using the same one over and over again.

[38:19] Mike Reed: Do you know of any good decorators in the Rochester area? Is there anybody you’d recommend?

[38:26] Deb Cleveland: I’m actually doing a flip right now in Rochester. I’m doing a repurposing of a church and two houses on the same lot. Networking is so important. I literally was sitting with an agent and I said, hey, do you know anyone that’s in trouble that needs help? She goes, oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t think of you. There’s a church that’s trying to evict a pastor, and I’ve never heard of that in my life. She said they’re really in trouble with this property, and there’s two more houses on it. I said, I’m not interested in evicting a pastor, but I’ll help him get it done. So I was able to pick up two houses and the church for $117,000.

[39:14] Mike Reed: Wow.

[39:16] Deb Cleveland: And I’m working on those right now. So I don’t know a decorator to answer your question, Mike, but they’re easy to find.

[39:25] Jeff Schofield: Yeah. I’ve got somebody — see me after the show.

[39:27] Mike Reed: Yeah, well I had one we used but their vision just wasn’t very good. So now we’re looking.

[39:39] Jeff Schofield: We’re wrapping it up. Deb, once again, how can people get ahold of you?

[39:45] Deb Cleveland: www.debcleveland.com — just like my name. You can follow me on Facebook, and I’m also on YouTube.

[39:53] Mike Reed: Excellent. Thank you very much for the call, and I appreciate you being on the show.

[39:57] Jeff Schofield: All right. We’ll see you all next week.

*— End of Transcript —*