Home Flipping Flies to 11-Year High

DAILY REAL ESTATE NEWS | THURSDAY, MARCH 08, 2018

Higher home prices don’t seem to be spooking investors from buying up properties to flip. About 207,088 U.S. single-family homes and condos were flipped in 2017, the highest level since 2006, ATTOM Data Solutions reports in its U.S. Home Flipping Report. That compromises nearly 6 percent of all single-family home and condo sales during last year. ATTOM Data Solutions defines a “home flip” as a transaction for a single-family home or condo that occurred within the year of a previous sale of the same property.

“The surge in home flipping in the last three years is built on a more fundamentally sound foundation than the flipping frenzy that we witnessed a little more than a decade ago,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. “Flippers are behaving more rationally, as evidenced by average gross flipping returns of 50 percent over the last three years compared to average gross flipping returns of just 31 percent between 2004 and 2006—the last time we saw more than 200,000 home flips in consecutive years.”

Further, financing for home flippers has become more readily available in recent years, Blomquist notes, but 65 percent of flippers still used cash to buy homes flipped in 2017. That is nearly the reverse of 2004 to 2006, when 63 percent of flippers were leveraging financing to buy, he notes.

ATTOM Data Solutions’ report shows that completed home flips in 2017 yielded an average gross profit of $68,143. (That represents the difference between the median purchase price and median flipped sales price.)

Of 52 metros analyzed with populations of at least 1 million, ATTOM Data Solutions researchers found that the highest home flipping rates in 2017 were in:

1. Memphis, Tenn.: 12.8%
2. Las Vegas: 9.1%
3. Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.: 9%
4. Birmingham, Ala.: 8.6%
5. Phoenix: 8.5%

Other major markets rounding out the top 10 for highest home flipping rates in 2017 were Baltimore; Virginia Beach, Va.; St. Louis; Miami; and Orlando, Fla.

The metro areas seeing the biggest growth in home flipping in 2017 were Buffalo, N.Y. (up 34%); New York-Northern New Jersey (up 29%); Dallas-Fort Worth (up 23%); Louisville, Ky. (up 22%); and Birmingham, Ala. (up 17 percent), according to the report.