‘Well, now that all my pleasant distractions are gone, I’ll definitely get to the grinding, difficult projects I’ve been putting off’, said… Well, everyone middle class and up during this pandemic.
It’s not a bad thing to be an optimist (or so I’m told). Something something, opportunity and crisis are the same in Chinese, except Chinese is not technically an actual language, and also
that’s not even true, and also diminishing returns on motivation are to be expected considering he general rise in stress amongst us 99%ers during these plague-ridden days.
Unsurprisingly, that means we’ve been seeing a drop in people willing to tread through the process of buying, oversee the remodeling of, and selling a house for profit. Considering I could
barely will myself to rearrange my bedroom after my nightly round of anti-maskcne treatments, I’m not too shocked.
COVID-19 proper and the layoffs surrounding the virus’ spread are hitting manual laborers hardest, increasingly leaving would-be flippers without the skilled professionals they need to realize their before/after visions, and idealists further down the financial ladder are reconsidering their investment priorities in the face of their own challenges.
As much sense as this makes, it is always nice to have trustworthy data to back up my ramblings. Check out the numbers from ATTOM Data Solutions:
What did surprise me about the latest trends though is that while numerically, fewer flips are occurring, monetarily fewer flips’ funds are filling fortunes faster! In other, less tongue-twisty words, the houses that are being flipped successfully are bringing even more profit. “Home-flipping again generated higher profits on less transactions across the United States in the third quarter of 2020 as investors continued to make more money on a declining number of deals,” Chief Product Officer, Todd Teta, of ATTOM Data Solutions lets us know.
Best guess here (or my guess, which is really the same thing) is that more experienced house flippers with COVID-proofed access to more resources—networks, funds, quality libations, et cetera have leveraged said advantages and raised the average accordingly. Kudos! The bulk of six-figure profits settled in California and the Pacific Northwest, while Texan metropolises and cities in the South saw lower profits in the teens, and as a Texan myself, I’m slightly saddened… But winning is winning no matter the margin.
What is it we can learn here? I say the lesson is the same we’ve been seeing since we first decided a fistful of gold was better than a fist full of berries—those who already have better tend to do better. Whether my musings hold true still remains to be measured, but no matter what the data shows, to all house flippers, breaker trippers, and hot toddy sippers out there… Best of luck, and I salute you.
