Today we’d like to introduce you to Keith Ori.
Hi Keith, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up in Hummelstown, PA, which is a pre-Revolutionary War town located in the central part of the state. It was pretty rural back then, and relative to now there wasn’t a lot for kids to do so my friends and I were always messing around, building stuff. We built tree forts, go-karts, all kinds of stuff out of leftover lumber, just for fun. Later on, I took architecture in high school and designed a few houses, which I enjoyed. Even though I took a circuitous route back to home building, I’ve always felt those experiences provided a foundation for later on.
My immediate dream as a young man, however, was to become a professional race car driver. After graduating high school, I delayed college for three years in order to pursue racing. I raced open wheel cars all over the East Coast but ultimately ran out of money and decided it was time to go to college. Unfortunately, I’d spent what little college money I had on racing, so I had to come up with another way to pay for college.
As my family had a strong military history (my grandfather, father and uncle served in the Army) I continued this tradition and joined the Army Reserves and paid for college with the G.I. Bill.
I finished training a month before school started and began my studies at the University of Southern Mississippi, eventually graduating four years later with a degree in Journalism.
I bounced around a little after college, backpacked Europe, but eventually settled in Orlando, FL, the city I’ve called home for the past 25 years.
I got started in home renovation when my wife at the time and I bought our second house and kept our starter house as a rental. It continually needed work and I figured out a little bit here and a little bit there. Before long, we had a few rental houses and as the landlord, I worked on maintaining them.
Along the way, we had three amazing Children; two boys, Ayrton and Conan, and a daughter, Zanuki. But more about that later.
Eventually, we sold one of the rental houses and I was kind of shocked at how much money we made. I thought to myself, “Perhaps there’s a business there”. This was before social media and house flipping shows weren’t a thing back then so I didn’t realize it was actually a nascent industry of its own. I guess you could say I stumbled my way into house flipping.
From there, I acquired more rentals and fixed up and sold a few of them, learning the business almost incidentally. We had about a dozen rentals when the great recession happened, and Orlando was one of the hardest hit areas. It was a really tough, unanticipated time. It wasn’t possible to flip houses because real estate values were in freefall so I started a company to do property preservation where we prepared already foreclosed houses for resale on behalf of banks, eventually processing about 3000 houses in 18 months. That was a pretty exciting time, a bit like the wild west.
By late 2011 home values had stabilized and it was again possible to begin flipping, and I got back into it in full force. In 2013 I won my first historic preservation award from the city of Orlando for best preservation of the year, and the next year, unrelated to that, A&E reached out because they were trying to cast a show with the working title of Zombie House Hunting.
We did a pilot in November 2014 and it went to series, with filming beginning in June 2015. It was really something to film for the first time- we had no idea what we were doing but we all tried hard, trusted each other, and produced a solid product in the end.
The show has been renewed three times and we’re presently filming our fourth season, a whopping 20 episodes! Filming, something I never imagined myself doing, has now become a regular part of my life and I genuinely enjoy it and the talented people on the cast and crew that I’m fortunate enough to work with.
We have a lot of episodes to go just in this season alone, and there’s always that next season, so I’m staying pretty busy and taking each day as it comes.
By far, my largest accomplishment in life are my kids, however. My oldest, Ayrton, is a professional race car driver who raced in the 24 Hours of Daytona last year in a prototype sports car at 16 years old. My middle child, Conan (14) is an accomplished filmmaker and comedian, and my daughter, Zanuki, is a nationally competitive rock climber and an Olympic hopeful for 2028 in LA. They are the number one thing in my life, and raising them is my greatest honor.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The global financial crisis hit Orlando hard. Real hard, and specifically the real estate industry. What most people don’t realize is that Florida is largely a real estate economy; it’s easy to think of it as a service economy because of the theme parks, attractions, and beaches, but the actual economic engine is real estate. Because of that, when the financial crisis occurred Florida got hammered, and myself and everyone else in the real estate industry were faced with some very uncertain times. I dealt with it by starting a property preservation company (detailed in the previous section), but there were some real gut checks along the way.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
It’s one thing to be a real estate investor, to flip houses professionally, but it’s quite another thing to be filmed doing it and be compelling to watch. I used to laugh when I’d hear actors, in an interview, talk about how hard it is on the set and all the work involved, but getting to see what the other side of that coin is like has been eye-opening. And I’m not an actor! I’d just filmed doing my job, but in a way that makes other people want to come along for the ride. It’s kind of amazing how much there is to learn and how much of a craft it is unto itself. So, if anything, I think the process of learning to convey our journey through a house has been a fascinating education and one that I thoroughly enjoy.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I mean, I’m probably not that guy. I didn’t have a mentor; I learned everything I know from just figuring it out or from the subcontractors I’ve hired. Mark Twain once said that he wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have him as a member, and I’m sort of in the same vein. I’m just not much of a joiner.
I joke that people think we all hang out at the TV House Flipper’s Club, but that nothing could be further from the truth. I know other flippers, of course, but flipping itself is a somewhat solitary activity.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @keithori
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100059640286428
- Twitter: @keithori
Image Credits
Photos are all property of Keith Ori
