- Single-family and condo home sales as completed flips increased 14 percent from Q1 and 3 percent from Q2 2015 to a total of 51,434.
- Areas with the most frequent home flips are concentrated in Florida.
- Five of the nine metro areas where home flippers can make more than $100,000 are located in California.
The trend of home flipping is increasing throughout the nation, according to a recent Attom Data Solutions report.
On September 15, the company released its Q2 2016 U.S. Home Flipping Report, finding the number of investors flipping homes is at its highest level since the second quarter of 2007, with a total of 51,434 home and condo sales getting flipped in the second quarter of 2016.
In Q2, 5.5 percent of all single-family and condo sales were flipped homes, which was a 0.1 percent rise from the Q2 2015 figures. In the first quarter of 2016, 6.7 percent of all sales were flipped homes, but that doesn’t mean there were more.
The total of flipped homes that make up the entire pool of single-family home and condo sales was up 14 percent from the first quarter of the year and 3 percent annually.
“Home flipping is becoming more accessible for smaller operators thanks to an increasingly competitive lending environment with more loan options for real estate investors, who are also benefiting from the historically low mortgage interest rates,” Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at Attom, said in a statement.
“That favorable lending environment for flippers has helped to fuel the recent flipping frenzy we’ve seen over the past five quarters.”
And while the trends reported by Attom are closely in-line with what was happening before the housing downturn, Blomquist pointed out a couple of key trends to keep in mind.
For instance, there is about one-third more cash-only buyers than there were in 2006, he says.
In the Q2, 68.3 percent of homes flipped were purchased with cash. These trends represent a bit of a slowdown on a quarterly and yearly basis, from 71.1 percent and 69.6 percent, respectively.
However, those buyers able to get in on a home flipping opportunity can make out like a bandit, the data show.
Flipped homes in the second quarter of 2016 sold an average $62,000 higher than purchase price — the highest average gross profit reported since the first quarter of 2000.
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Areas with the most frequent home flips are concentrated in Florida. Among 100 metro areas with at least 90 homes flipped in the second quarter of 2016, Tampa (10 percent), Lakeland-Winter Haven (9.5 percent), Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormong Beach (9.4 percent) and Miami (8.6 percent) were in the top 10. In Miami — as well as Baltimore, Las Vegas and New Orleans, among others –the home flipping rate was 7 percent.
However, those really looking to make some bang for their buck might look outside of Florida. The highest gross ROI for flipped homes in the second quarter were Pittsburgh (133.3 percent), Allentown, Pennsylvania, (117.9 percent) and New Orleans (111.5 percent).
Some of the nation’s most expensive metros are also optimal for home flippers just looking for a high return and have money for the up-front investment.
According to Attom, home flippers can earn big bucks in these metros: San Jose ($161,000), San Francisco ($146,000), Los Angeles ($125,000), New York City ($124,160), San Diego ($111,250), Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, California ($110,000), Baltimore ($105,000), Washington D.C. ($104,500) and Seattle ($102,900).
In the nine metros throughout the nation, flippers could get an ROI of more than $100,000. Five of them are in California.
