owners just shut the door and walked away<\/a>. Dainard tries to bring those houses back up to livable condition, but he acknowledges there\u2019s some controversy about flipping real estate.<\/p>\n\u201cA lot of people have bad thoughts about flippers, and I think there\u2019s right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it,\u201d Dainard says. \u201cWe buy homes that are not habitable. We\u2019re providing housing. We\u2019re able to fix these homes that most people don\u2019t think are fixable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dainard says what he does is different from hedge funds that buy tract homes across Middle America.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is taking away housing because they’re buying, like, carpet and paint jobs,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don’t buy any of that just because, honestly, I can’t figure out how to make money on those anyways, because homeowners will naturally usually out-pay you. But hedge funds, obviously, have a lot deeper pockets. I don’t think it’s really the flippers [who are the issue]. I think it’s the big hedge funds that buy rental properties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dainard says he usually tries to preserve what\u2019s special about a home architecturally, or even its setting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a house [this season] that was on a really big lot that typically they\u2019re gonna knock over and pack, like, five cottages into, which people are very fatigued of in Seattle,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we got to make this big half-acre lot with a huge backyard and really salvage that house.\u201d<\/p>\n
In each episode of \u201cMillion Dollar Zombie Flips,\u201d Dainard and his teammates \u2014 project manager Ryan Burgess and broker\/designer Megan Halter \u2014 work with a different flipper to rehabilitate a property. The flipper manages the work based on Dainard\u2019s plan using Dainard\u2019s cash. Dainard and the flipper split the profit after the rehabbed house is sold.<\/p>\n
In the Season 2 premiere, the focus is on a two-bedroom, two-bath Ravenna home built in 1918 with \u201ca grandma chic vibe,\u201d per Halter. They turn the home into a four-bedroom, but not before encountering a crumbling foundation.<\/p>\n
In addition to homes in Kenmore and Ravenna, this season Dainard works with flippers to renovate homes in Edmonds, Kirkland, Renton, Bellevue, Haller Lake and Wedgwood.<\/p>\n
Episode 2 features a fire-damaged Renton house built in 2004 and a contractor who tries to replace legitimate trusses with two-by-fours.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s the third episode, airing April 25, that\u2019s most meaningful to Dainard, as he renovates a home once occupied by his grandparents.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was probably the hardest house I’ve ever had to renovate, because you don’t [usually] get those emotional ties when you’re renovating a house, and it was like a flood of it coming in,\u201d Dainard says. \u201cI couldn’t even watch it get demoed. I had to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another episode, currently scheduled to air May 23, features a property originally designed by Pacific Northwest architect Wendell Lovett.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s in a neighborhood called Hilltop, which is in Bellevue \u2026 and it’s basically 40 midcentury homes done by numerous different famous architects,\u201d Dainard says.<\/p>\n
A tree hit the house and the owners planned to tear it down, but after growing fatigued by a three-year permitting effort, the owners opted to sell.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was actually extremely excited, because having this house torn down would have been a piece of art just getting wrecked,\u201d Dainard says. \u201cIt’s not your standard flip, because it’s more of a restoration rather than a renovation, because you want to keep that architectural integrity, and it’s very hard to do. It’s more expensive, and it definitely takes a lot more time and thought to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re trying to keep every little detail, not only for the buyers, but also I’m a big midcentury fan,\u201d Dainard says. \u201cThat is my favorite architecture. And I can definitely say I’ve ruined some of them back in my early career, because when you’re in your 20s, you’re like, \u2018OK, I have this budget,\u2019 and you don’t really know design. Anytime I get a midcentury house now, it’s my way of restoring them the correct way.\u201d<\/p>\n
This new season of \u201cMillion Dollar Zombie Flips\u201d filmed July through December last year with 10 homes in various stages of construction over that five-month period.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe almost have to get them done faster than we normally do, because you have dual pressure\u201d from the projects themselves as well as the TV show\u2019s production schedule, Dainard says. \u201cBut overall, the job sites ran very similar to how we do them normally, except for now we have a bunch of cameras following us around and we have to sometimes stop and repeat ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah, yes, the occasional second-take necessity on unscripted TV series is a real thing.<\/p>\n
Dainard says fronting a TV show offered \u201ca huge learning curve\u201d in Season 1.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did feel a lot more natural in Season 2,\u201d he says. \u201cThe first season you’re getting your bearings. You have to learn how to talk out loud. Whatever’s going on in my brain, I have to announce it. That felt weird in Season 1, like, I’m talking to myself all the time. Season 2 was a lot easier.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the second season of A&E\u2019s Seattle-set \u201cMillion Dollar Zombie Flips\u201d (11 a.m. Saturday), investor James Dainard encountered a new horror in one of the derelict \u201czombie\u201d homes he and his team bring back to usable life. \u201cI always think that I’ve seen it all, and then I see more,\u201d Dainard says, pointing to \u201cthe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2367577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2367576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/James-Dainard-on-\u2018Million-Dollar-Zombie-Flips-Season-2-lessons.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2367576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2367578,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367576\/revisions\/2367578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2367577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2367576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2367576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2367576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}