House flipping fading in Denver

[Matt M.]

Hot off the press from the most accurate RE site in the world. By the way I on my next flip tomorrow;) However I will say that if you are not aggressively looking for a flip almost daily, you won't find one. 

Higher home prices are putting a dent in the popularity of house flipping in metro Denver, according to a new study from Trulia.

About 4.5 percent of metro Denver home sales involved flips in the third quarter of 2015, down from 5.7 percent of sales in the same quarter a year earlier, Trulia found.

That ranked Denver 51st out of 85 metro areas that Trulia looked at for flips and was among the bigger declines found in any metro area.

In fix-and-flips, an investor buys a home that needs repairs at a discount then resells the property at a higher price after fixing it up as quickly as possible.

Trulia puts Denver in a group of cities, along with Los Angeles and San Diego, where escalating home prices have raised the risk for rehabbers and cooled speculative activity.

Some flipped homes are getting pushed into more expensive price tiers, which means they take longer to sell....

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_29533885/hou...

[David Faulkner]

I don't know Denver, but this sounds very familiar to me as I've seen it play out a few times in SoCal as the cycle changes. First the flippers make a killing. Then their margins get squeezed as bunch of others jump in and bid up. Then the developers kill it for awhile. Then the market tanks, the developers get killed, and the buy-and-hold folks swoop back in. When buy-and-hold gets too expensive, the flippers come back ... the REI circle of life.