House flipping proves profitable in several Pennsylvania cities

Several cities in Pennsylvania are offering high return on investment for house flipping.

According to ATTOM Data Solutions, across nearly 200 metro areas with a population of 200,000 or more and at least 100 house flips, Scranton had the highest ROI at 168.2 percent, followed by Pittsburgh at 145.5 percent. Philadelphia wasn’t too far behind at 115.7 percent, while Erie flippers made 114.1 percent ROI for the fourth quarter of 2017.

Across the country, 207,088 homes were flipped in 2017, an increase of 1 percent from 2016 and hitting an 11-year high. Nearly 6 percent of all home sales were flipped houses, an increase of 0.2 percent from 2016. The number of entities, including organizations and individuals, who flipped homes was up 4 percent from last year, and reached a 10-year high.

For homes flipped last year, the report found that the total dollar volume of financed purchases was $16.1 billion, up 27 percent from last year and a 10-year high. Completed flips gave investors an average gross profit of $68,143, and increase of 5 percent from 2017, and the highest ever since ATTOM began collecting data in 2000.

“The surge in home flipping in the last three years is built on a more fundamentally sound foundation than the flipping frenzy that we witnessed a little more than a decade ago,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. “Flippers are behaving more rationally, as evidenced by average gross flipping returns of 50 percent over the last three years compared to average gross flipping returns of just 31 percent between 2004 and 2006 — the last time we saw more than 200,000 home flips in consecutive years.”

It took owners an average of 182 days to complete the flip, the same amount of time as 2016.