This story discusses the season finale of The Flip Off, which aired on March 5, but contains NO SPOILERS about which team won the house-flipping competition. The six-episode season is available to stream with a Max subscription.
HGTV fans have been familiar with Tarek El Moussa and Christina Haack for over a decade now, so of course when we learned that The Flip Off was coming to the 2025 TV schedule, our main focus was on the awkward premise of pitting the exes against each other. But how did Heather Rae El Moussa feel about it? The Selling Sunset veteran spoke candidly about what it was like doing a show with the bickering exes and the dynamic of their blended family.
The Flip Off was not originally intended to be a three-person show. Tarek and Heather El Moussa were supposed to face off against Christina and Josh Hall, but that all changed when the Halls filed for divorce and they decided to continue production without Josh. That meant Heather was left to deal with the former spouses by herself, and she spoke candidly with her girlfriends on the March 5 finale “The Final Flip Off” about what that was like for her, saying:
It’s like they’re so competitive with each other in general. They fight like they’re brother and sister. I’m always mediating things. Tarek was always saying, like, ‘You guys will get along. I know you guys well, and I know you’ll get along with each other,’ and we actually do. Her and Tarek had big issues, especially when I met them. They were still, like, they hated each other. So it was navigating how I came into the picture.
It sounds like that competitive spirit that we see between Tarek El Moussa and Christina Haack is part of their dynamic even when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s pretty funny that the house-flipper knew that Heather Rae would get along with his ex. Ahead of the show they leaned into how much the blonde designers resembled each other, and we’ve seen this season on The Flip Off that their taste in design is uncannily similar.
While it can’t be easy to be the middle man in their squabbles, Heather El Moussa told her friends she really respects the way Christina Haack welcomed her in as a co-parent when she and Tarek started dating in 2019. She said:
What I really admire about her is that she let me come in and be a stepmom. That’s a big thing to me, because as a mom it would be really hard to have another woman raise my kids, right?
The former Flip or Flop stars have two children together — Taylor, 14, and Brayden, 9 — while Tarek and Heather share 2-year-old Tristan. Christina Haack also shares 5-year-old Hudson with her second husband Ant Anstead.
In addition to being stepparents to each other’s children, Heather Rae El Moussa said she and Christina Haack have been able to team up against Tarek (as demonstrated at the end of The Flip Off), continuing:
What’s funny is that we tend to, like, because she starts picking on Tarek, and then I start picking on him too. It’s fun. I’m not gonna pick on Christina, and she’s not gonna pick on me, so we turn on him. He gets all the attention.
It was sweet to see how the El Moussas supported Christina Haack through her divorce from Josh Hall, and I love that the blended family has found a way to live and even work together. That’s quite a situation for Heather to have put herself in, and we’ll have to see if there are more competitions to come between her husband and his ex.
In the meantime, you can check out Tarek and Heather sans Christina on The Flipping El Moussas, with new episodes airing Friday nights on HGTV and streaming the next day on Max.
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