Don’t believe what you see on the cable shows — home flipping is a tough business. And it’s getting even tougher, with fewer flips and smaller profits.

Nationwide the number of home flips was down 5.2% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, according to a new report from ATTOM Data Solutions.

And U.S. home flipping returns fell to nearly an eight-year low.

Flips accounted for about 6% of all U.S. sales in the second quarter.

Tight home inventories and high prices in many markets are putting pressures on investors who hope to buy and quickly resell properties.

“Home flipping keeps getting less and less profitable, which is another marker that the post-recession housing boom is softening or may be coming to an end,” Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions, said in a new report. “Flipping houses is still a good business to be in, and profits are healthy in most parts of the country.

“But push-and-pull forces in the housing market appear to be working less and less in investors’ favor,” he said. “That’s leading to declining profits and a business that is nowhere near as good as it was a few years ago.”

Attom Data estimates that almost 60,000 U.S. single-family houses and condos were flipped in the second quarter. Flips are properties purchased and resold within a year.

The largest number of second-quarter flips were in Phoenix and Atlanta.

Dallas-Fort Worth ranked 10th with about 1,200 home flips. That was down 28% from D-FW’s first-quarter flip total.

See the full Dallas News article

By Steve Brown

6:49 AM on Sep 19, 2019