About 45,901 U.S. single family homes and condos were flipped in the third quarter, a decrease of 12% compared with the third quarter of 2017 to reach the lowest level since the first quarter of 2015, according to ATTOM Data Solutions.
About 5% of all single family home and condo sales during the third quarter were flips. That’s down from 5.2% in the second quarter and down from 5.1% in the third quarter of 2017.
“Home flipping acts as a canary in the coal mine for a cooling housing market because the high velocity of transactions provides home flippers with some of the best and most real-time data on how the market is trending,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions, in the firm’s quarterly Home Flipping Report. “We’ve now seen three consecutive quarters with year-over-year decreases in home flips. The last time that happened was in 2014 following the mortgage rate jump in the second half of 2013, but it’s still far from the 11 consecutive quarters with year-over-year decreases in home flips extending from the second quarter of 2006 through the fourth quarter of 2008 and leading up to the last housing crash.”
The average profit on a home flipped in the third quarter was $63,000, down from an all-time high of $68,000 in the first quarter and down from $65,000 a year earlier.
States with the highest home flipping rates for the third quarter included Arizona (7.7% of all sales), Tennessee (7.5%), Nevada (7.2%), Alabama (6.6%) and Maryland (6.0%).