High costs for residential investment properties are leading to dwindling profit margins for home flippers.
Profits for home flipping—buying a residential property with the intention of creating value through improvements and then quickly putting it back on the market—have fallen steadily since their peak in the fall of 2012, a recent report by real estate analytics company Attom found.
Back then, investors were netting about a 63 percent return on investment before expenses. In the second quarter of 2025, however, yield shrank to about 25 percent, the lowest profit margin Attom recorded since the Great Recession of 2008.
Profits have eroded as the median price for homes surges. Home flippers paid a median purchase price of nearly $260,000 for investment properties in the second quarter, the most since Attom began tracking home-flipping statistics in 2000, the company reported. Flipped properties, meanwhile, sold for a median price of $325,000, flat from the first quarter of 2025….