10 Places Where House Flipping Is Most Profitable
 

moneytalksnews.com

Real estate data company Attom has a new report identifying U.S. counties where home flippers made the biggest killings in 2022.

Flipping, as anyone who watches TV surely knows, involves buying, (usually) renovating and then reselling a home with the hope of turning a profit.

Flipping can be lucrative. Attom, reviewing data on about 400,000 properties, found the gross profit — the difference between the median price paid by investors and the median sales price — to be $67,900 in 2022.

Bear in mind, though, that real estate in many of the counties below can be seriously expensive. Flippers’ profits are shrinking and annual profit margins are at their lowest since 2008. The return on investment for these flips dropped to 26.9% in 2022 — down from 32.6% in 2021 and from 41.9% in 2020.

As Attom explains: “[t]he median value of the homes they flipped rose more slowly than the median price they paid to purchase properties – 12% versus 17%.”

Following are the median profits on a 2022 home flip in each of the 10 U.S. counties where flipping paid off best. We end with the county where flipping was most lucrative.

10. Fauquier County, Virginia

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $250,000 in 2022

Fauquier County is only 45 minutes from the bustle of Washington, D.C., but with its horsey, rural and small town atmosphere, it might be a world away.

The annual median household income here is more than $111,000. The county has roughly 75,000 residents, about 38% of whom have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the U.S. Census Bureau notes.

Notable events on one local tourism site’s calendar include horse and pony shows, twilight polo matches, fox hunts, horse races and wine tastings at some of the county’s 27 wineries and vineyards.

9. Washington County, Pennsylvania

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $252,472 in 2022

Washington County’s Department of Parks and Recreation oversees 5,500 acres of park land that have bike, bridle and walking trails, picnic shelters, recreational programs, fishing and hunting.

The population of the county is more than 200,000 and includes 32% with a college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

8. Santa Clara County, California

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $252,500 in 2022

Santa Clara County (the county seat is San Jose) is an area known as Silicon Valley. Pioneering electronics companies, including Xerox, Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor and Apple Computer, are a few of tech giants that emerged from this county in the second half of the 20th century.

Today, 54% of the county’s 1.9 million residents hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

7. Kaua’i County, Hawaii

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $254,876 in 2022

The island of Kaua’i is the fourth largest of Hawaii’s eight major islands. Even here, in paradise, county government is needed to pave roads, fight fires, collect taxes, build and manage parks and see to other community functions.

Kaua’i County, which includes the entire island, also has its own film commission.

6. Monroe County, Florida

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $260,000 in 2022

Speaking of paradise, Monroe County, Florida, is the home to the legendary Florida Keys, a chain of islands running southwest of the Florida peninsula’s southern tip to Key West, the county seat.

Like Kaua’i, Monroe County is a stunning and familiar location to fans of films and TV shows including “Bloodline,” “The Fast and the Furious” and the Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall classic film, “Key Largo.”

5. Sussex County, Delaware

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $298,108 in 2022

Sussex County is on Delaware’s easternmost coast; it’s part of the Delmarva Peninsula that’s separated by Chesapeake Bay from mainland Delaware and Maryland.

The city of Rehoboth Beach (population 1,400), famed as a summertime mecca, is in Sussex County.

4. Marin County, California

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $300,000 in 2022

Marin begins at the northern border of San Francisco County. It stretches north to include 70 miles of open coastline and 40 inland miles of coastline along San Francisco Bay.

Literally half (50% or 167,000 acres) of the land in Marin County is used for farms or ranches, according to the University of California Cooperative Extension.

3. Loudon County, Tennessee

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $325,900 in 2022

Loudon County, with about 58,000 residents, is southwest of Knoxville in the Tennessee River Valley.

The area is replete with Civil War history and the town of Loudon is a stop on the Civil War Trail of Tennessee and the Appalachian Quilt Tour, says the tourism site Tennessee River Valley.

2. Frederick County, Maryland

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $343,362 in 2022

The city of Frederick, the county seat of Frederick County, has made it onto numerous best-places lists. The local tourism council points to a “growing number” of micro-distilleries, hiking (including access to the Appalachian Trail), paddling (by canoe or kayak) and festivals, all less than an hour from Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

1. San Mateo County, California

Median profit made by flipping a home in this county: $350,000 in 2022

San Mateo County is on the San Francisco Peninsula that links San Francisco in the north to San Jose in the southeast and hugs the coasts of both San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

In this wealthy county — the median household income was $136,837 in 2021– 52.5% of the 729,000-plus residents have a bachelor’s degree or above, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.