Hummelstown native stars on 'Zombie House Flipping' reality show

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• Sue Gleiter | sgleiter@pennlive.com

Zombie House Flipping

Keith Ori, far left, with the cast of "Zombie House Flipping," which airs 10 p.m. Saturday on the FYI network. Ori is a native of Hummelstown and graduated from Lower Dauphin High School in 1987.

(Provided)

Hummelstown native Keith Ori never expected he would star on a reality television show.

Living in Orlando, Florida, Ori is married with three kids, and is a successful real estate investor.  So when his friend, "millennial house flipper" Justin Stamper, asked Ori last year to join "Zombie House Flipping," he accepted the offer.

"The fact I was tapped for a reality show is not something I foresaw on the horizon," said Ori, a 1987 graduate of Lower Dauphin High School.

Unlike other reality shows about dramatic house transformations, "Zombie House Flipping" targets some real diamonds in the rough. (Zombie house is an industry term for a vacant, foreclosed house.)

In the eight-episode show, project manager Stamper and his team, including builder and designer Peter Duke and realtor and designer Ashlee Casserly, comb the downtown neighborhoods of Orlando in search of vacant, foreclosed homes in major disrepair. They are joined by Stamper's trusty companion, Marley.

The show follows them as they turn the monster homes into desirable properties. By the end of the show, they sell the renovated projects for a profit.

"Zombie House Flipping" airs at 10 p.m. Saturdays on the FYI network.

Ori said he would not have done the show if he didn't think "Zombie House Flipping" would have had a decent chance at success. They worked with production company, Pilgrim Studios, which also taped "Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe" as well as "Somebody's Gotta Do It" and "The Ultimate Fighter."

The fact Ori had worked with the other three castmates in and around the Orlando area, made the show more appealing. He has lived in Orlando for about 20 years.

"We were all friends before this and we all did business," he said.

Ori arrived in Orlando in about 1997 after traveling around the nation working for SkyTel Company following his graduation from the University of Southern Mississippi. He still visits his parents, David and Carol Ori in South Hanover Township.

"Orlando is like the biggest small town in America," he said.

Obviously, the Orlando region is the ideal place to tape a show about house flipping. The "boom or bust" market led the nation in foreclosures even before the market recovered a few years ago.

In 2008, Ori said the housing market in Orlando was "positively post-apocalyptic. There was a period where it was not viable to buy or flip."

"Every third house was a zombie house at one point," Ori added.

Since taping for the show began last June, the team flipped eight houses. Typically, Ori said he flips about four houses in one year so the process was slightly accelerated for production purposes.

In one episode, they purchase a home on Sweetbriar Street at a short sale for $135,000. The home's condition was worse on the inside than the exterior revealed with beer bottles littering the yard, Ori said.

They turned around the home and sold it for $310,00 with a gross profit of $102,000, he added.

"That's what's called a 'six-figure flip.' That's not typical," Ori said.

While "Zombe House Flipping" is a reality show, Ori said the depiction of what goes on behind the scenes is an authentic and an accurate portrayal.  In addition, he said the cast genuinely gets along and viewers won't see unrealistic fights and drama.

"They didn't have stunt people come in and buy the houses. What you see on television is the direct product of what we did," he said.