George Clarke’s Flipping Fast, review: property development as a game show is a cruel concept
Michael Hogan
2 min read
George Clarke’s Flipping Fast, review: property development as a game show is a cruel concept
As the cost of living crisis takes hold, a new Channel 4 show arrives with the promise that it can make us rich. “This can be a very, very exciting and lucrative career that can give you life-long financial freedom and security,” says one of the resident experts on George Clarke’s Flipping Fast, albeit with a caveat that “it takes hard work to prevail”.
That career is flipping houses – buying them cheap, doing them up and selling them on. The show features six teams, each handed £100,000 and instructed to turn the biggest possible profit in the space of a year.
There are, obviously, financial pitfalls to this endeavour. But neither the presenter, George Clarke, nor the experts, Stuart and Scarlette Douglas, spell this out at the beginning. It falls instead to two contestants, Pamela and Gordon, to illustrate just how tough things can be.
Gordon is an HGV driver and Pamela is a part-time care assistant. He’s 55, she’s 59. They have never owned a property, and have left it too late to get a mortgage. They are desperate to win the show – the winners get £100,000 in cash – and go at it with absolutely no game plan. While other contestants look in areas they know well, Pamela bids online for a house she has never seen in a town (Stockton-on-Tees) she’s never heard of. Their successful £52,000 bid is only £3,000 less than the average price of a fully-renovated property in the same area, and it needs a ton of work.
To watch this couple floundering, while the presenters tut away, feels almost cruel. No, it’s not their money, but the project is clearly taking a physical and mental toll. They’ve given up their home and moved into a caravan in order to do this. And the playing field isn’t fair, because they’re up against Harriet, a savvy young woman whose major advantage – which she fails to mention to the others at the outset – is that her fiancé’s family are builders, and will carry out all the renovations she needs immediately and at a discount.
I suppose it is an instructive show, if you want to get into the property business. But so is Homes Under the Hammer. I will keep checking in as the series goes on, though, in the hope that Pamela and Gordon’s luck improves. This is TV, after all, where underdogs sometimes prevail. Let’s hope they learned their lesson from property number one. Despite all their hard work, and achieving a sale price of more than £70,000, they made a profit of just £1,280.
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