The number of house flippers and houses flipped have hit decade highs, yet changes in financing methods, and higher home prices and margins have reduced net returns.
"The surge in home flipping in the last three years is built on a more fundamentally sound foundation than the flipping frenzy that we witnessed a little more than a decade ago," Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at Attom Data Solutions, tells CNBC. "While financing for flippers has become more readily available in recent years, 65 percent of flippers still used cash to buy homes flipped in 2017, nearly the reverse of 2004 to 2006, when 63 percent of flippers were leveraging financing to buy."
Taylor Denchfield has been flipping homes in Maryland since he was 17. At 25, he's a veteran with a strict strategy for profit. His net returns are about 30 percent per project. Denchfield purchased a small home in Silver Spring, Maryland ... he put in about $80,000, and the bet paid off. He sold the property in two weeks and expects to make a net profit of about $100,000. "You have to be able to get in for a low enough price, it has to be a hot enough neighborhood and you have to know exactly what the build is going to entail."
