I think one needs to be in a certain mindset when approaching lease “flips.”
Your mindset must be, “if I get stuck with this car, I’m happy to drive it at this payment for the remaining term.”
And, as others have mentioned here, it’s really only something that can be done in this current market, if using the sell to 3rd party option as the key strategy. With this, 3rd party sales are becoming more difficult as well since the banks are shutting this down because they want their cars back.
As long as one is comfortable getting stuck, then it can be a fun game to play.
I will probably flip 3 cars this year that were leased in 2021. 2 of those I got with the intention of selling or transferring (has also become much harder this past year to the point where it’s not worth the hassle). The few thousand I’ll get on the sell end means I got to drive a great car for effectively no money, or a slight profit. That’s what is interesting to me and what drives me to do it (driving some cool cars on the cheap).
You can’t expect make a lot of money on these flips on a regular basis.
Some of the best sells right now are folks who had no intention of that ie 10-12% off Tacoma leases two years ago