Recently, the New York Post published a story about the destructive impact that home flipping is having upon New York City neighborhoods.
They cite the figure that in 2017, over 2,000 one-to-four family homes in New York City were bought and resold within a year. According to the story this trend sees no let up.
The problem that this is creating a New York City is that affordable housing is at a premium. A secondary impact of the home flipping trend is that many of the flip houses have rental units which are seeing their renovation prices post flip jump dramatically.
In the majority of real estate markets, home flipping actually restores liquidity to those neighborhoods that have been significantly impacted by the crash of 2008.
This is not the case in New York City real estate market. The affordability issue is so serious that the legislature is considering proposing a steep tax on speculative transactions.
The stats for the house flipping market for the 5 boroughs in the last 5 years puts the number of homes flipped at 9,000, affecting 15,000 individual housing units. The home flippers purchased the foreclosed properties at an average of $212 per square foot in 2017 and were able to flip those properties for $368 a square foot.