The flippers are back. The number of single-family homes and condos flipped in 2016 zoomed to a 10-year high, a new report from ATTOM Data Solutions shows.
The report shows that 193,009 single-family and condos were flipped in 2016, up 3.1 percent from 2015 and the highest level since 2006. ATTOM Data Solutions defines a flip as a home that was sold twice within a 12-month period.
Home flips comprised 5.7 percent of all single-family and condo sales in 2016. That is still far below the 2005 peak, when home flips accounted for 8.2 percent of all sales, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, which tracked 950 counties for the report.
“Home flipping was hot in 2016, fueled by low inventory of homes in sellable or rentable condition along with a flood of capital—both foreign and domestic—searching for the returns and stability available with U.S. real estate,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. “The combination of more home flips and a greater share of financing for flip purchases resulted in a 19 percent jump in the estimated dollar volume of financing for home flip purchases, up to $12.2 billion for the flips completed in 2016—a nine-year high.”
Investors in search of flipping returns are increasingly showing willingness to move to secondary and tertiary housing markets and neighborhoods with older, smaller properties that are available at a deeper discount, Blomquist says.
“Given that many of these markets are more affordable, we are also seeing a higher share of the flipped homes sold to FHA buyers, with that share reaching a four-year high of 19.6 percent in 2016,” he says.
Among the 117 metro areas with at least 250 home flips in 2016, the following areas saw the highest percentages of home flips, according to the report:
- Memphis, Tenn.: 11.7%
- Clarksville, Tenn.: 10.1%
- Visalia-Porterville, Calif.: 10.1%
- Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.: 9.9%
- Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, Fla.: 9.9%
Source: RealtyTrac
