After watching the first episode of the six-part HGTV Series, The Flip Off, I declared it the greatest home renovation show I had ever watched on the network.
The Flip Off features Tarek El Moussa, alongside his wife Heather Rae, competing against Tarek’s ex-wife Christina and her husband Josh in a flipping competition. The name, The Flip Off, is a play off of Flip or Flop, the hit show Tarek and Christina filmed together when they were married. During its peak, Flip or Flop was the No. 1 show on all of cable television on Thursday nights.
Post divorce, both Tarek and Christina have found success in front of and behind the camera. While they share custody of two children, Taylor and Brayden, they both have new marriages (two new marriages in Christina’s case), other children with their new loves, and solo hit HGTV shows.
It was already common knowledge that during the filming of the show in summer 2024, Christina divorced Josh, creating even more anticipation for fans of the stars to air. The show kicks off with Christina and Tarek chatting it up while on the field at one of Brayden’s soccer games. Christina asks Tarek how his flipping business is going, to which Tarek replies 2024 was a better year than 2023. Tarek then goes on to explain why, with the comps going up, little inventory on the market, and buyers needing to buy homes. Christina says she knows why and accuses her first-ex for thinking she knows nothing about flipping. She says even though she hasn’t flipped in years, she can still beat him (and Heather), and the flipping competition is on.
At Christina’s house, they set the rules for the competition:
The judging criteria for the judges are:
Christina chooses the kitchen as the first challenge, with the teams having two weeks to complete. Heather and Tarek choose Heather’s friend Heather Dubrow as the first judge.
While on their way to look at a house to buy, Josh and Christina get into a fight in the car, where Josh is upset because Christina is being a “b*tch,” to which Christina replies she hasn’t said a word. In a confessional, Christina says Josh has always been jealous of Tarek and thinks they flirt every time they are with each other, and it upsets him.
Later on in the episode, the then-couple is discussing making changes. Josh wants to do all this work to basically blow out the entire house for $400,000, and Christina says while she loves to spend, she knows how Tarek operates. She’s flipped houses with him, she knows what she’s doing, and they don’t need to spend that amount of money. Josh storms out.
The next scene see’s Christina inviting Tarek over to her house. She asks he come without Heather. He immediately sees she’s upset and asks what’s wrong.
We then get an incredibly emotional scene where Tarek and Christina talk about their past. Everything that happened with their divorce, their lives after, and how they both did each other wrong – but they got through it, and they will always respect each other. Tarek then asks his ex if she still wants to do the competition, to which she replies, “of course,” but that she needs more time on the kitchen renovation.
This starts a series of favors going on within the challenge. For this favor, Tarek asks to see Christina’s house, to which she agrees, but he has 10 seconds to run through the house. Heather and Christina predict Tarek won’t remember anything in the house, to which they are right.
As the kitchen challenge wraps up, Tarek continues his running gag of calling his ex-wife, “second place,” and Heather Dubrow awards the kitchen challenge to Tarek and Heather while at Tarek and Heather’s office. The episode ends with Christina taking a picture of a flipped house she designed off the wall in Tarek and Heather’s office.
The constant back and forth and joking between the contestants sets the tone for what’s to come.
In episode two, after suffering defeat in the kitchen challenge, Christina decides she needs to mess with Tarek more to get inside his head during the main bedroom/bathroom challenge. She decides the judges for the challenge are going to be her mom…and Tarek’s mom (and she’s not telling Tarek and Heather about Tarek’s mom being a judge!).
One of the best scenes in the entire series occurs when Christina tells her design assistant Kylie that her and Tarek’s mom are still on good terms, that they still go on vacation together, and that Tarek’s mom even told her not to marry his son back in the day!
For winning the kitchen challenge, Tarek and Heather request Christina buy them tile for their bathroom. As Christina goes to drop off the tile at Tarek and Heather’s residence, she decides to bring with her Izzy Battres, who is the former contractor for Tarek and Christina during the Flip or Flop days and still does work for both. Her entire plan is to rattle Tarek’s competitive side by making him think Izzy is her new partner on the project.
Christina continues to believe she has the upper hand on Tarek and Heather when she pretends to be Heather on a call to the tile company to get their address to their flip house. With Tarek and Heather on a weekend getaway for Heather’s birthday, Christina and her real contractor on the project, Michael, go tour their competition.
Her constant messing with her ex is unsuccessful in the end, as the moms award Tarek and Heather the main bedroom and bathroom challenge. The moms had no idea whose house was whose going into the judging and thought they were awarding the win to Christina.
Now down 2-0, Christina decides to change her strategy with the living room challenge. She knows Tarek and Heather are spending a lot more money than her from the feedback she’s received on the first two challenges. While her goal is still to get more ROI than Tarek and Heather, she goes for the WOW finishes in the living room.
Over at Tarek and Heather’s, the couple wants to add bi-fold doors in their living room overlooking the backyard, but they need more time. Tarek’s ego gets checked when Christina says, “Oh, the ‘No. 1 Flipper in the World’ needs more time!” She knows exactly how to get at him: there’s an old wooden table with stained chairs in her house Josh was going to save and re-use. The table is in no condition, and Tarek and Heather have to use it in their space, however, they do not know it’s a table, as Christina only tells the couple it’s a piece of furniture. They accept and are shocked when Christina and Michael drop it off. They’re also rattled that they know where their house is, and they still don’t know if Michael’s her partner on the project.
Heather and Tarek realize Christina never said anything about the fact they had to use the physical table, so they shred the table and use the mulch in the room. The guest judge for the episode, Amanza Smith, who is good friends with Heather from their time on the Netflix series Selling Sunset, awards the living room challenge to Christina because of Heather and Tarek’s inability to use every square inch in their space properly, causing Tarek to say he’s “going up to his room and cry” (LOL!).
Now 2-1, Christina brings her taunts to the next level by asking her second ex-husband, Ant Anstead, to judge the guest bedroom and bathroom challenge. Tarek and Heather thought Christina and Ant were not on good terms and are shocked by the development. Tarek sums it up perfectly when he says, “Three ex-husbands in one challenge.”
It does turn out Christina and Ant had a nasty break-up, and even though they share custody of their son Hudson, they had not been on speaking terms until after Christina and Josh broke up. In a confession, Tarek says, “I’ll never forget one night I was in bed scrolling through social media, and there it was: a photo of Christina and Ant that said, ‘married,” and I had no idea. I had texted Ant and told him to treat my kids like your own, and he never responded. I wonder why they got divorced!”
He then reveals in another confessional that once Ant and Christina separated, Ant reached out to him and apologised for how he acted towards him, and Tarek believes he and Heather actually have a better relationship with Ant than Christina.
But before Ant judges the spaces, Tarek and Heather owe Christina bathroom tile for winning the living room challenge. When they go to pick up the tile, they realize they have the exact same tile for their own project! In order to settle who gets to keep their tile, Tarek challenges Michael to a hot sauce eating contest. Whoever asks for milk first loses. If nobody asks for a drink, they both get to keep the title. Even though the boys’ faces were turning pink by the fourth and final sauce, ranked 10/10 on the hotness scale, they survived the challenge, and both teams kept their tile, with Heather and Christina debating how the other were going to use said tile, so they could do something different.
Ant is shocked by the design of both teams, saying the bedrooms are supposed to be kids’ spaces, but they are designed like adult spaces. He rips Heather for putting wallpaper on the bedroom ceiling, saying he “hates it, and it should never be done.”
When it comes time to determine a winner, Ant determines there is no winner. According to him, it’s not a flipping competition; it’s a personal competition. He awards the victory to his ex-wife, only because they share a child together. When Tarek and Heather leave Christina’s backyard, Ant tells Christina that Tarek and Heather have spent a lot more money than her, and it shows, but that she can still win the entire challenge and to not lose sight of the ROI.
The final indoor spaces are judged in the fifth episode by Izzy and Jeff Lawrence, another contractor who used to work with Tarek and Christina on Flip or Flop. However, before the judging begins, Tarek and Heather look for any advantage they can by using a drone to spy on Christina’s home. The little gadget flies through the rooms, and Tarek and Heather realize Christina’s house is a lot nicer than they anticipated.
When it comes time to determine the winner of the final indoor challenge, Jeff and Izzy, who judged the spaces blindly the way the moms judged in episode two, rip both houses apart. They worry about Tarek and Heather’s craftsmanship on the work, the amount of money their spending, their ROI, and the fact their house is next door to an airport, and that could hurt the resale value. From Christina’s perspective, they are also worried about the craftsmanship of her home, but they think she has bigger ROI potential.
The contractors end up awarding Tarek and Heather the win because of their bigger transformation, setting the stage for the sixth and final episode of the series: the yards (both front and back) challenge and the selling of the houses.
For the backyard challenge, Christina chooses the “Original King of House Flipping” Jeff Lewis to judge the yard spaces. While waiting for Lewis to decide the winner of the yard challenge at her flip house, Christina gets an interested buyer for her house at around $1.1 million.
Lewis throws out the categories for the judging and says the competition is not even. Tarek and Heather have a bigger house with a bigger yard. They spent more money. Their house is nicer, but that now, it’s all about the ROI.
Both teams get to see each other’s houses before their open houses to get a feel of what they’re going up against. Now knowing Christina is going to sell her house for around $1.1 million, Tarek does the numbers and realizes there is a chance he may lose to his ex-wife.
All the people involved in the show, including friends and family, have a big gathering at Christina’s house to determine the winner of The Flip Off. Lewis comes back with the numbers:
Christina spent $600,000 on her house. She had a rehab budget of $300,000. She closed at $1.1 million, giving her a net profit of around $200,000 and an ROI of 24%. Tarek and Heather spent $700,000 on their house and had a rehab budget of $400,000. Their house sold for $1.5 million, netting approximately $400,000 in profit and an ROI of 38%.
Tarek then brings out a championship belt he had made before the competition even began (!), declaring himself the “True King of Flipping”. Now that Christina has to send Tarek, Heather and the kids on a paid vacation, Christina reveals in a confessional she wants a rematch, but she’s proud of Tarek, and she sees how much his flipping mindset has changed since meeting Heather.
The show ends with Christina and Heather pushing Tarek into Christina’s pool with the championship belt around his waste. For fans of the series that have watched Flip or Flop since the pilot over a decade ago, this show was a treat, and it brought back the dynamic of Christina and Tarek together again on camera. As Heather tells her friends, “They fight like brother and sister.”
The show was not just a flipping show; it was a flipping reality competition show, and I loved every second of it. I hope we did get The Flip Off part two in the future.
