Investors shift away from flips
- Market commentary said flippers are slowing because high costs and low yields are pushing investors toward long-term holds. (x.com) - Observers noted agents are increasingly taking equity stakes and using AI tools to source and analyze off-market comps. ( ) - That trend increases reliance on private comps and data, changing how deals are found and priced outside MLS. (x.com)
Home flippers are doing fewer deals and keeping more properties, as high borrowing, renovation and carrying costs squeeze the quick-resale model. (attomdata.com) ATTOM said investors flipped 297,045 single-family homes and condos in 2025, down 3.9% from 309,050 in 2024 and the lowest annual total since 2020. Flips accounted for 7.4% of all home sales, down from 7.6% a year earlier. (attomdata.com) The profit math also worsened. ATTOM put the typical gross profit on a flip at $65,981 in 2025, with a 25.5% return on investment, the weakest margin since 2008. (housingwire.com) Investors did not leave housing. Cotality, formerly CoreLogic, said investors bought 32% of single-family homes in January 2025 and 29% in June, above the 25% share a year earlier. (cotality.com) Cash kept them competitive even as financed buyers struggled. Realtor.com said 32.8% of U.S. home purchases in the first half of 2025 were all-cash, only 0.6 percentage point below a year earlier. (realtor.com) At the same time, the market for homes that never hit the usual public feeds got bigger. The National Association of Realtors made its “Multiple Listing Options for Sellers” policy effective on March 25, 2025, creating a delayed-marketing category that lets sellers hold listings back from Internet syndication for a period set by the local multiple listing service. (nar.realtor) That policy left the one-business-day Clear Cooperation rule in place after public marketing begins, but it gave brokers another channel to keep deals inside private networks longer. NAR said local multiple listing services had until September 30, 2025 to implement the change. (nar.realtor) Brokerages and portals then fought over where those listings should appear. Zillow said in a March 17, 2026 update that listings publicly marketed to some buyers should be available to all buyers, while Compass and Rocket said on February 26, 2026 that Compass private and coming-soon inventory would be distributed on Redfin. (zillow.com) (rocketcompanies.com) Compass and Rocket said that alliance could add more than 500,000 listings to Redfin over time. That expands the pool of homes found through brokerage relationships and private inventory, not just through the open multiple listing service. (rocketcompanies.com) As more deals start in private channels, pricing leans harder on off-market comparables collected by brokerages, data vendors and investor software. The shift away from fast flips is not just about holding longer; it is also moving more of the search, valuation and negotiation process outside the public listing system. (redfin.com) (propstream.com)
