Meet zombie house flipper Dolmar Cross

In Florida’s rollercoaster real estate market, house flipping has become a cottage industry. For the astute and thrifty purchaser, there are profits to be made in buying low, doing minimal renovation work, and re-selling high.

Sometimes, though, the renovations are extensive, and expensive, and the profit margin shrinks accordingly.

Somewhere in the middle of all this fiduciary arithmetic are those who seek out the worst, most decrepit single-family homes, mildewed and rotting, glass broken and insects swarming. The ones that look for all the world like nobody would want to walk through the front door, much less live there, ever again.

These are the “zombie” house flippers.

Tampa’s Dolmar Cross has been buying and selling horrible homes for over a decade. He’s so good at it, the A&E network hired him in 2022 to be part of its hit reality series Zombie House Flipping.

On each episode, Cross, accompanied by a realtor (Samantha Middleton) and a designer (Amanda Areopagita) enter a foreclosed house in Hillsborough, Pinellas or Pasco County, pronounce it disgusting, then talk about making it beautiful.

It’s not always instinct, says the 38-year-old flipper.

“Sometimes you have to wait until all the crap’s out, and you have a clean canvas, and you can say ‘OK, what do we do here?’ Sometimes the creativity takes a little bit of time. But I love the transformation.”

After Cross buys it from the bank comes Demo Day. The three of them remove kitchen and bathroom cabinets, closet doors, thin walls and more with sledgehammers. “I always come back with some scratches and bruises,” he admits, “but for me it’s the most fun day.”

After contractors have finished whatever professional-level work the three can’t do themselves, the home appears “reborn.” On the show Cross documents all the costs involved along the way, and at episode’s end, someone snaps the place up and our heroes count their greenbacks.

Filming for the A&E reality series. Screengrab.

“Oftentimes,” Cross explains, “these ugly zombie houses are a drain on the neighborhood. They’re feeding on the other houses! Bringing down values.”

And so the “stars” of Zombie House Flipping – there are teams in Orlando and Dallas, and everyone’s episodes are aired on a rotating basis – are usually given a hero’s welcome when they arrive.

“I just contracted a house in Town & Country, right on the water,” says Cross. “And right when I pulled up in the truck, the neighbors came out saying ‘Thank God you’re doing something with this!’ The owner there had terrorized the entire neighborhood. It was a hoarder house, and the ugliest house in the neighborhood.

“The neighbors are going to be happy that you’re fixing up the house. The city’s going to be happy because the house is back on the tax roll, bringing in revenue for them.

“Now someone can come it and buy it, and hopefully make it their forever home.”

He generally has several homes going at once, at one stage or another in the flipping process. They’re not all “zombies,” of course, but those are the houses that the TV producers are interested in showing.

“I also do what we call paper flipping, where we just put a property under contract at a discounted price, and just sell our interest in that contract to another buyer. We’re not actually buying the house, we’re just flipping the paper.

“I can’t talk about that on the show, because that’s not sexy. On TV, they want to see the physical transformation. So we buy the ugliest, nastiest, most disgusting houses that are basically dead and forgotten about. We restore them. We try to make them sexy again.”

“Sexy” is a word that Dolmar Cross uses a lot. Because he’s enthusiastic about his work, it’s become kind of his signature thing on Zombie House Flipping. The other members of his team make fun of him about it, pretty much constantly.

Born in Jamaica, the son of a preacher, Cross lived in the Caribbean until age 10, when the family moved to Florida. He received a BA in Communication from the University of South Florida.

His first professional job was making balloon animals, he says, but real estate always fascinated him. In the earliest days he was doing what he calls “lipstick on a pig” renovations – just make it livable again, sell it and move on to the next house.

A serial entrepreneur, Cross is CEO of Real Capital, the co-founder of the successful real estate education company Real Advisors, and still the owner and principal at 3Day Cash Buyers, his original flipping company.

He continues to invest in properties all over Florida, above and beyond his work on the TV series. His 14-year-old daughter Kyra, an aspiring designer, has begun working with him on several projects.

On June 3, A&E will air a just-wrapped episode wherein Cross and company “de-Zombify” a house in St. Petersburg.

And the money continues to roll in. “We have a house in Spring Hill that’s airing this weekend – when that one sells, it’ll be $65,000 that we make,” Cross says. “That house that we just put under contract, where the neighbors are thankful, that’s going to be a six-figure flip. And there’s another one in Tampa we just got under contract, and that’s also going to be a six-figure flip. We range from anywhere between $50,000 to $100,000 profit on these deals.”

And that, make no mistake, is sexy.