By DON FENLEY

TRI-CITIES, Tenn. – Investors flipped a record number of homes last year in this inventory-starved market.

According to ATTOM, a property data provider, there were 749 flip sales in the region’s two metro areas last year. Combined, it was the best year for flip sales in more than a decade.

The gross profits for the buy-renovate-and resale turnarounds investors slipped to their lowest level since 2008 on the national level. But that wasn’t the case locally. Average local gross profits were up from the previous year.

Flips are an important part of the local housing market – especially in the portion of the market for first-time buyers and workforce housing.

Here’s a capsule look at the region’s 2022 flipping market in its two metro areas:

Johnson City metro area

There were 305 flip sales in the three-county metro area, up 15.4 percent from last year and 95.3 percent higher than a decade ago. The peak year for flips was 2006, when there were 323 sales.

Investors paid a median sales price of $128,000 for their investment properties last year. Those homes averaged 1,300 square feet and the median year built was 1996.

Sixty-two percent of those purchases were cash sales. The average sales price after renovation was $220,000.

The average gross profit was $92,000, up from $72,100 last year. The average gross profit is the difference between the purchase price and flipped price and does not include the rehab and other expenses. Flipping veterans estimate that those costs typically run between 20 percent and 33 percent of the property’s after-repair value.

The average time from purchase to flip sale was 186 days and 31.8 percent of the sales were to cash buyers.

Kingsport-Bristol metro area

There were 444 flip sales last year in the four-county metro area’s peak year. That was a 26.2 percent increase from last year and up 120 percent from 10 years ago. Last year was the peak year for Kingsport-Bristol’s flip market.

The median sales price investors paid for a house to flip was $104,250, and 64 percent of those sales were cash deals. The median year built was 1985 and the median square footage was 1,248.

The average flip sales price was $182,000, and the average gross profit was $77,750, up from $75,250 the previous year.

The average time to rehab and market the flip was 182 days and 31.5 percent of the sales were to cash buyers.

ATTOM analyzed sales deed data for this report. A single-family home or condo flip was any arms-length transaction that occurred in the quarter where a previous arms-length transaction on the same property had occurred within the last 12 months.

Categories: CORE DATA