This Is the Most Profitable City to Flip a House

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Most Profitable City to Flip a House

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According to Realtor.com, 59,000 homes were flipped in the United States from April to June. Flipping a house is defined as buying one with the intention of selling it at a profit, usually after repairs. One challenge is that the profit is at risk between the buying and the selling. However, that risk almost certainly has fallen some because of the huge real estate boom in America.

Home values have skyrocketed in some cities by percentages well into the double digits. One reason for that is exceptionally low interest rates. Another is that people have moved from expensive coastal cities like New York and San Francisco to inland cities with more reasonable real estate prices and what is often considered a better quality of life. These relocations have been made easier because millions of people can now work from home.

Realtor.com has issued a research paper titled “With Profits Flopping, These Are the Best (and Worst) Places for Home Flippers.”

However, the home-flipping business may not be as profitable as it seems at first, at least in some places. Charles Tassell, a real estate investor and chief operating officer of the National Real Estate Investors Association, commented, “There is opportunity, but you’ve really got to be smart in where you purchase and know that market. Finding the right spot is the hard part right now.”
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Real estate prices have always been tied to location. Flipping is no exception.

Two things stand out in the report. One is that some very rapidly growing cities tend to produce the best profits for flipping. Another is that more and more flippers want “turnkey” houses that do not require large sums to repair. Homes that do not need any improvement tend not to bring the profit margins like those that do.

The most profitable city for flipping homes is Columbia, South Carolina. The median list price in September was $275,000. The median profit on flipped homes is $61,667, a remarkable 22% of the home price.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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