Easy flips are officially over. The kind where rising prices covered blown budgets, slow contractors, and “we’ll make it up on resale” math have quietly disappeared. What’s left is a smaller, tougher flipping market, where experience, discipline, and speed matter more than optimism.

Story: The numbers are in, and they’re not subtle. Home-flipping activity fell for the second year in a row, with 297,885 homes flipped in 2024, down 7.7% from 2023 and more than 32% from the 2022 peak, according to ATTOM. Flips now make up 7.6% of all U.S. home sales, continuing a steady pullback as higher rates and tighter margins squeeze casual investors out of the market. That said, flipping isn’t dead; it’s just harder. Typical gross profits actually rose to about $72,000 per flip, delivering a 29.6% ROI, up slightly from last year but still well below the peak returns of the last decade.

So What? This is the market where easy money gets exposed. Appreciation no longer extends to poor underwriting, slow renovations, or overly optimistic timelines. The investors who are still flipping properties successfully look less like speculators and more like operators… People who know their contractors, control their scopes, and buy with margins baked in from day one. For long-term investors, the flip slowdown has a silver lining: fewer aggressive flippers bidding up entry-level homes. That creates more breathing room for buy-and-hold strategies and value-add acquisitions, especially in secondary markets where competition has thinned.

What’s Next? Expect flipping volumes to stay subdued into 2025. Elevated mortgage rates, limited low-cost inventory, and cautious buyers mean deals will remain harder to pencil. Watch for two things: regional divergence (smaller markets outperforming big metros) and time-to-flip discipline becoming the defining profit lever. If rates ease or distressed inventory ticks up, flipping activity could rebound modestly, but don’t expect a return of the “any deal works” era.

Source: MSN

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