Tarek And Christina El Moussa
By, Elia Garza
Personal Life
Christina was born in Anaheim, California and grew up in Anaheim Hills. She began working in the real estate industry right after college, where she met her husband, Tarek El Moussa, who earned his real estate license at age 21. The couple was selling real estate in the southern California area when the housing market plummeted after the October 2008 stock market crash, they went from living in a $6,000 per month home to a $700 per month apartment.
Tarek and Christina married in 2009 and have two children, Taylor and Brayden.
Tarek was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2013 when a viewer of the TV show (a registered nurse) noticed a lump on his thyroid gland and wrote in to say that he should have it checked. After testing, the doctors found that the lump was cancerous and he was scheduled for immediate surgery.
Their Show Flip Or Plop
The El Moussa Family
Tereck Smashing A Kitchen
Their Story
The couple were both real estate agents prior to the crash in 2008, and later began flipping homes, mostly located in Orange County, California.
One day in 2011, Tarek asked a friend to help him make an audition tape for HGTV. The friend filmed an entire episode of the process of house flipping from start to finish. The audition tape was sent to HGTV and they were interested in talking to the couple. In 2012, HGTV signed the couple to a regular weekly program that shows the process of buying distressed property and renovating it.
In an interview for Variety Magazine, Christina said "each episode shows things that can go wrong, and do go wrong".
Christina's real estate expertise is primarily in design and she works with Tarek to find and renovate homes. She handles the designs of the new spaces and keeps everything on schedule. The show follows them as they buy homes, typically bank-owned, short sales, or foreclosures to renovate and resell.