Solano Real Estate Scene: Jim Porter
Article By: Jim Porter – February 13, 2026
I have written about flippers before and how most successful full-time house flippers rarely hit homeruns.
A homerun flip is an investment where everything goes right with the transaction from the purchase date until the house is sold in a timely manner for a good-sized profit. Investors that buy houses in as-is condition for all cash deal with a ton of risk, and now more than ever flippers have to deal with a lot of competition.
Speaking of competition, not only are there many local investor flippers that live here in Solano and Yolo County looking for distressed sellers and trashed houses every day, there are also dozens to maybe even hundreds of larger competitors from Wall Street investors – like Invitation Homes and Blackstone – to companies like John Buys Bay Area Houses and Laurel Buys Houses.
It is absolutely amazing to me how many investors are out there looking for sellers with home equity that may be willing to sell their property for cash at 60% to 85% of what they could sell the house for if they hired a local real estate professional that had access to cash or access to a local mortgage broker with private money for bridge financing or staging and renovation costs.
A few years ago, I asked one of my flipper friends, “why did that guy sell you his free and clear house for only $310,000, when he could have spent $40,000 on it and sold it for $500,000 in 70 days”? He replied with, “because he wanted his money in 10 days and he did not have the $40,000 to do the work.”
I guess I watch a lot of TV and listen to the radio in my car, so YouTube and Meta has targeted me as a person interested in real estate. I now see and hear a lot of ads from people like Laurel, who is based in Sacramento, and John, out of Walnut Creek, looking to buy my house for cash in 10 days. So I did some research for my column this week.
Laurel has been doing this for 26 years and is a general contractor that has been featured on Fox 40 and “Good Day Sacramento.” I do not know Laurel but she and her team look pretty good on their website.
John is a fascinating success story about two brothers and a sister that are the founders of Zoom RE. These young people – brothers Or and Yoav, and sister Michal Kirshenboim – started this real estate investment company 10 years ago and bought their first home in Oakland. They now have offices in seven markets across the country.
John Buys Houses has been on NBC, CBS and Forbes.The Zoom Re website shows their headquarters are in Tel Aviv, Israel, while John Buys Bay Area Houses is in Walnut Creek. According to the website, they have closed more than 2,000 homes and now have a real estate portfolio of more than $100 million.
Bottom line folks, before a person sells a trashed or inherited house, there is absolutely no downside or cost in calling a local mortgage professional or Realtor for advice.
Jim Porter, NMLS No. 276412, is the branch manager of Solano Mortgage, NMLS No. 1515497, a division of American Pacific Mortgage Corporation, NMLS No. 1850, licensed in California by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the CRMLA / Equal Housing Opportunity. Jim can be reached at 707-449-4777.
