US home flippers' typical margin slips to 21.5% in second quarter

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Investors who buy a home, renovate it and sell it again within a year earned a thinner return across the United States in the second quarter of 2026. The property data firm ATTOM, in its second-quarter 2026 U.S. Home Flipping Report published on 1 October 2026, puts the typical gross profit margin on a flipped home at 21.5%, down from 25.7% in the first quarter and from 27.6% a year earlier.

The report is the data firm's own count, built from the sales records it collects. Its headline describes a gradual decline in flipping profits that has now lasted two years. The detail is more varied than the headline: more homes were flipped than in the winter, flips made up a smaller part of all sales, and the distance between the most and least rewarding cities is very wide.

Rob Barber, ATTOM's chief executive, said in the release that flippers are still making money in most markets, while the typical return keeps narrowing. Both halves of that sentence can be read in the tables.

The quarter beside the two before it

ATTOM gives each national measure for the quarter with the same measure three months and twelve months earlier. Set side by side, they show which movements are seasonal and which have lasted.

The margin is the line that moved most. It lost 4.2 percentage points in three months and 6.1 points in a year. In dollars, the typical gross profit was US$6,406 lower than in the first quarter, a fall of about 9.6%, and US$10,474 lower than in the second quarter of 2025, a fall of about 14.8%.

One line moved in the investor's favour. The average flip took 161 days from purchase to resale, four days fewer than in the first quarter and five fewer than a year earlier. Time matters in this business because every week a home is held is a week of costs. A shorter hold does not make up for a smaller profit, but it softens it.

More flips, a smaller share of sales

The count and the share point in opposite directions, and it is worth being clear about why. ATTOM recorded 13,231 more flips than in the first quarter, an increase of about 20.4%. Over the same three months, flips went from 8% of all home sales to 6.2%, a drop of 1.8 points.

Both statements are true together when overall sales grow faster than flips do. A flip is one kind of sale among many, and the share only says how large that kind is against the whole. In the second quarter, the rest of the market expanded more than the flipping segment did, so flippers completed more deals while becoming a smaller presence in the total.

Against a year earlier the picture is plainer. There were 2,486 fewer flips than in the second quarter of 2025, a fall of about 3.1%, and the share was 1.1 points lower than the 7.3% of that quarter.

The retreat in the share was broad. ATTOM analysed 186 metropolitan areas. The flipping rate fell from the first quarter in 162 of them, or 87.1%, which leaves 24 where it held or rose. It fell from a year earlier in 131, or 70.4%, leaving 55. Margins fell quarter over quarter in 126 metros, or 67.7%, so 60 metros went the other way or stood still. A national figure of 21.5% is therefore an average over places that are moving apart.

The highest flipping rates in the report are in smaller cities of the South and the Midwest. Columbus, Georgia, leads at 13.6% of sales, followed by Canton, Ohio, at 11.6%, Akron, Ohio, at 11.2%, Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 10.9% and Macon, Georgia, at 10.6%. Among metros of more than one million people, ATTOM lists Cleveland first at 10.4%, then Columbus, Ohio, and Memphis at 9.5% each, Dallas at 9.4% and Phoenix at 8.9%. The lowest rates in that large-metro group are Rochester, New York, at 2.7%, Seattle and Washington, DC, at 4% each, Pittsburgh at 4.5% and Portland at 4.8%.

What the gross figure leaves out

Every profit figure in the report is gross, and ATTOM says so in its methodology. The firm defines a flip as two arm's-length sales of the same home within 12 months. Gross profit is the resale price minus the purchase price, and nothing else.

A worked example, with illustrative figures that come from no market, shows how much that matters. Assume an investor buys a home for US$200,000 and resells it for US$250,000. The gross profit, as the report would count it, is US$50,000. Now apply the range ATTOM gives for renovation and other costs. At 20% of the US$250,000 resale value, those costs are US$50,000, which is the whole gross profit. At 33%, they are US$82,500, which is US$32,500 more than the gross profit.

The example is not a description of the typical flip, and the real cost of any project depends on the home, the works and the financing. It shows only that a gross margin and a net result are different things, and that a few points lost on the gross figure are lost from a slim base. This is why a move from 27.6% to 21.5% in a year is read closely by the people who fund and carry out these projects.

The cities where the margin is wide, and where it has gone

The spread between large metros is the most striking part of the report. Among metros of more than one million people, the typical gross margin runs from above 80% to below zero.

Behind the three leaders, ATTOM lists Virginia Beach at 63.4% and Philadelphia at 62.8%. At the other end, Salt Lake City stands at 4.7%, and San Antonio is the one large metro where the typical flip sold for less than it was bought for, at -0.3%.

Four of the five lowest margins are in Texas. With renovation costs still to come off, a typical gross margin under 5% means that the typical project in those metros did not cover its works, on ATTOM's own cost range.

Two cities appear in both rankings, in opposite ways. Pittsburgh has the highest margin of the large metros and one of the lowest flipping rates, at 4.5% of sales. Dallas has one of the highest flipping rates, at 9.4%, and one of the lowest margins. The report does not explain the pattern, and it would be a guess to do so here. What the figures do establish is that a busy flipping market is not a sign of a rewarding one, and that the two measures have to be read together.

Price bands, and the buyers at the other end

ATTOM also sorts flips by what the investor paid. Homes bought for between US$100,000 and US$200,000 returned the best typical gross margin, at 28%. The band from US$200,000 to US$300,000 follows at 26%, and the band from US$300,000 to US$400,000 at 20%.

The cheapest homes did worst. For homes bought at US$50,000 or less, ATTOM reports a typical loss of US$15,000, a margin of -38%. A very low purchase price is not, on these figures, a protection.

The report then looks at who buys the finished home. In the second quarter, 10.7% of flipped homes were sold to buyers using FHA financing. That is 0.6 points more than in the first quarter and 1.6 points less than the 12.3% of a year earlier. In some metros the share is far higher: Baton Rouge at 28.2%, Reading, Pennsylvania, at 25.3%, Tuscaloosa at 23.9%, Scranton at 23.4% and El Paso at 22.3%. In those places, around a quarter of flipped homes go to an FHA-financed buyer, which ties the flipper's resale closely to the terms of that programme.

Financing at the cheap end of the market is also in the news this week for another reason. Inman, the trade publication, reported on 7 October 2026 on a HUD pilot concerning small-dollar mortgages. It cites Realtor.com data showing that 20% of loans under US$100,000 in 2026 were for investment properties, and the view that more small mortgages would likely lift fix-and-flip activity. That is one publication's reading of a pilot, not an outcome, and it concerns loans below the price band where ATTOM finds the best margins.

How far the figures can be pushed

Three limits come with the report, and ATTOM states the first two itself.

The first is the gross basis already described: no figure in the report is what an investor kept. The second is coverage. ATTOM notes that it expanded its coverage of sales records in 2026 and that this may affect the counts. Comparisons of the number of flips between 2026 and 2025 should be read with that in mind, since part of a change in a count can come from what is recorded as well as from what happened. Margins and shares are less exposed to this than raw counts, but the firm's caution applies to the report as a whole.

The third limit is in the word "typical". The national margin, the national profit and each metro's margin describe a flip in the middle of the range. They say nothing about how many projects did much better or much worse.

A flipping report measures the distance between two sale prices. What happens to the home, and to the investor's money, in between is not in it.

For agents, the report is most useful as a local map. Flippers are both buyers and sellers: they take on homes that need work and bring them back as finished listings. Where margins are wide, that activity has room to continue. Where the typical gross margin has fallen to a few points, the report gives a reason to expect investors to be more selective about what they buy and at what price, though it makes no forecast of its own.

For investors, the comparison across three quarters carries the main message. The typical gross profit has gone from US$71,000 to US$60,526 in a year, while the average hold shortened by five days. Whether that leaves a project worthwhile depends on its costs, and those are the figures the report does not hold.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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