The answer first. Here is a quick decade long summary of activity involving the largest Self Directed IRA (SDIRA) custodian in one county (Wake county) in NC. The 4 columns don't format nicely, but for each year, column 2 represents the transactions for SDIRA lending, column 3 for SDIRA Buying, the last column for SDIRA Selling of property. More below.

Year  D-T Deed-to Deed-From
2003 0 3 1
2004 0 4 1
2005 0 1 1
2006 1 9 5
2007 5 4 4
2008 8 2 4
2009 10 11 6
2010 9 19 4
2011 9 17 12
2012 17 33 12
2013 6 32 18
2014 15 40 37

Totals 80 175 105

First some terminology. I'll say "Holder" to mean the SDIRA customer (the beneficiary) who makes decisions for the account, and initiates loans or purchases via the custodian of the account. Now in the table,

D-T - means the Holder initiated and made a real estate loan to another party (e.g. flipper)
Deed-To - means the Holder initiated an investment in real property, held by the Custodian, for the benefit of Holder
Deed-From - means the Custodian sold the property. In general this means Holder initiated a transaction to sell.

A quick summary would be: Wake county still has growth in the Self Directed IRA REI activity, both lending for and owning real estate, but the volume of SDIRA activity is still extremely minute (less than 0.01%) in the context of the overall market. (D-T activity averages well over 100 transactions per day and DEED activity is nearly that rate.)

The more interesting questions are:

1. Where are people finding property for their SDIRA?
2. What price ranges? Are they flips?
3. Are they making any money?

My initial gut feel was that people using a SDIRA for their investment probably are buying discounted property, probably REOs from banks and maybe a small percentage were buying foreclosures from the courthouse. I figured most (lending and buying) would involve flips. I knew that my SDIRA purchases were bank owned property, but I wanted to investigate and verify my premise.

In answer to #1 above, I was surprised to find about 40% of purchases came from trustee (courthouse foreclosure from trustee), executor, or sheriff sales. HUD and VA were only 3%, and REOs were only about 10%. About 15% came from LLCs of one sort or another and the rest from "regular" names.

To answer #2, Price ranges of the SDIRA sales I analyzed (about 25) were mostly <$150K, but I need to look at more sales before making any conclusions. Are they flips? Yes. In 2014, the majority of sales (37 total) from a SDIRA involved a "flip":  22 flips, 6 land Buy/Hold sales, 3 improved lot Buy/Hold (e.g. rental) sales, 6 I couldn't figure out in 60 seconds or less (Note 1) and are probably land deals.

It's a little hard to answer #3. The 28 day "flip" from $133K purchase to $543K sale probably made the Holder money, but how am I to tell. They probably didn't have to put in $400K! In some of the land deals the Parcels disappear (see note 1 below) so it's not as straightforward as it might seem to figure out 'buy for A... sell for B... so B-A-taxes ~= profit. My SDIRA sale in 2014 (a Buy/Rent/Hold) was buy at $37.5K, rent at $855, sell at $60.5K... but there was rehab cost, selling costs, etc. that made the profit not as glamorous as $60.5K-$37.5K from the transfer taxes.

So, Summary #2: It's clear that SDIRA investors are anticipating more profits from flipping than lending. Even though many of us were struggling to find deals in 2014, these SDIRA investors found deals to flip.

(Note 1) I couldn't find a match to indexed descriptions, which most likely means the parcel was subdivided (e.g. description says 29.035 ACRES and becomes 1A lots) or combined (e.g. 2 TRACTS becomes 10.65 ACRES)