How I became a house flipper and entrepreneur
Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Drew and Jonathan Scott are household names — literally. With a $250 down payment just out of high school, the Scott brothers bought and flipped their first house and have, in turn, created a real estate empire.
USA TODAY caught up with real estate guru Drew Scott to talk about everything from the NBA to grabbing an opportunity.
Question: What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Answer: I’ve gotten to play in the Celebrity All-Star Game three times, and for me that’s a really big thing because, as a kid, I wanted to be in the NBA.
Q: Who is your biggest mentor?
A: As cheesy as it might sound, my parents — there’s support that parents give their kids, and then there’s what mine gave — just beyond encouraging. I wanted to be an actor as a kid, and a lot of people would tell you to be realistic, but from a young age, our parents really realized that Jonathan and I were so driven. When we set our mind to something, we could make things happen, and they were so supportive.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: It’s long days, and it depends on which show.
Right now with Brother vs. Brother, Jonathan and I both do our own design and renovations. So we’re up typically 5:30 or 6 a.m., we’re filming all day. We have meetings and interviews at lunchtime, and then at the end of the day we have meetings for our furniture line or we have development meetings for our production company, Scott Brothers Entertainment.
Right now we’re working with Habitat for Humanity and are doing two builds for these amazing families in Nashville, so we’re basically on a plane every two to three days. Even when we’re in a city to film the show, we’re still always on a plane to work with one of these other campaigns or activations or QVC. It’s usually around 10 p.m. or so where we’re wrapping up.
Q: What does your career path look like, from college to now?
A: Some people think it’s a success story overnight, but it just wasn’t that way at all. We were just always pushing the envelope, trying to reach for that next rung and trying to find an opportunity. We’re very much opportunistic in a way that we’re always open to finding these new opportunities. It wasn’t luck — we made sure that we had the skills in place so that when an opportunity came around, we were ready to act.
We heard real estate was a good way to make money, so we thought, let’s get into that — it could fund our creative endeavors so that we could do what we loved to do. We got every late-night infomercial package, every book, every VHS tape to teach us how to make money in real estate. We bought our first house when we graduated high school, and it was a $200,000 house — we assumed the mortgage and bought it for a down payment of $250, and that’s where it all began.
We flipped it and made a $50,000 profit, and that’s where we realized, if we’re smart with real estate, we could expand into any passion we had. As we started to grow and flip more properties, I became a real estate agent and started making money as an agent. Jonathan went to school for real estate design, and we grew our company.
I tried to get back into acting in Vancouver and started getting pitched as a host for real estate shows because of my real estate expertise. At first, I remember thinking, this is lame — I don’t want to be a host, I want to be a superstar, I want to act. The more we talked about it, with our personalities and how we are on our feet, we thought maybe there is something good with hosting; maybe it could give us the opportunity to grow our brand and the businesses that we run, and it did.
We’ve expanded into our production company, our furniture and décor line and into stuff like GuruHub, a digital lifestyle network.
Q: What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
A: I can remember when I was younger and my dad saying to Jonathan and me, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.”
He told us that if someone told us we couldn’t do something, to find five ways that we could. And that just always really resonated with me.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
A: Part of it would be the same advice that my dad gave me when I was younger — never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. There’s always a way to do it if you leave yourself open to those opportunities.
I don’t believe in getting lucky, I never have — luck is actually being ready to take advantage of an opportunity when it arises because you have the skill set you need and the drive and determination to do it. We’ve always had that ability to grab hold of opportunities because we were ready for them.