Celebrated by cable TV shows and touted by get-rich-quick gurus, home flipping is coming back with a vengeance across the U.S.
And the trend of buying houses to resell for quick profits is making a comeback in Dallas-Fort Worth, too.
Nationwide home flips were at a nine-year high in the first quarter, Attom Data Solutions reports in a new study.
Almost 44,000 homes around the nation were purchased and resold within a 12-month period.
"Home flippers financed an estimated $3.5 billion in purchases for homes flipped during the quarter, up from $3.3 billion in the previous quarter and up from $2.4 billion a year ago to the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2007 — a more than nine-year high," Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at Attom Data Solutions, said in the report.
Home flips accounted for 6.7 percent of all single-family home and condo sales during the first quarter of 2017.
Some of the country's highest home flipping rates were in Memphis (15.1 percent); York-Hanover, Pa. (12.5 percent); Fresno, Calif. (11.1 percent); Birmingham, Ala. (10.3 percent); and Las Vegas (10 percent).
Several Dallas-area residential districts also have high rates of home purchased by investors hoping to make a quick flip.
In Lancaster 26.8 percent of the homes sold in the first quarter were resales from within the previous 12 months. And 25.6 percent of sales in the Dallas 75224 zip code were flips.
Mesquite had a 20.8 percent home flip rate. And 14.6 percent of the home sales in Garland were flips, according to Attom.
Nationwide homes flipped in the first quarter of 2017 were sold for a median price of $200,000 for a gross profit of $64,284, the study shows.
The median size of U.S. homes flipped was 1,402 square feet and the median construction was in 1978.
More than two-thirds of homes flipped were by flippers who completed just one flip during the quarter. And more than a quarter of homes were resold to an all-cash buyer, Attom found.
