ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. —
The Tampa Bay area seems to just keep growing, and it's showing in the housing market.
Now, some groups are turning to flipping homes to turn a profit and help homeowners get a deal.
Driving down city streets like Westshore Boulevard in South Tampa, the trend is on full display as construction crews continuously either tear down old homes to build new or work on complete facelifts for older homes.
It’s a trend that’s going strong in Tampa Bay, but significantly decreasing nationwide, according to recent reports from real estate data curator, ATTOM, and the research leg of storage facility marketplace StorageCafe.
Tampa was listed as one of the best cities in the country to buy a fixer-upper. StorageCafe found buyers save an average of $80,000 when buying a home to renovate in Tampa, and found even more savings in Florida’s other major cities: Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville.
Meanwhile, ATTOM found that the average return on investment for the entire country on fixer-uppers is the lowest it's been since 2007.
The number of single-family homes and condos flipped in 2023 went down 29.3% from the year before, which the organization said is the largest annual drop since the Great Recession in 2008.
Specifically, the report points out that the number of homes flipped by investors went down last year along with profits and profit margins for quick flips. According to ATTOM, gross profits on “typical home flips” in 2023 went down $66,000 nationwide.
But investors aren’t pulling out of the fixer-upper industry in Tampa Bay.
If you’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area over the past couple of years, you may have noticed it seems like more and more old or vacant homes get purchased by corporations and turned into brand-new homes, much of the time offered as rentals.
And this isn’t just a suspicion, according to a recent analysis done by the Tampa Bay Times.
The report found that the corporate landlords with the biggest presence in Tampa Bay are “investment firms based in Arizona, Illinois, Texas and elsewhere.”
As of September 2023, seven different companies owned more than 1,000 homes in the Tampa–St. Petersburg area. None of them got started in Florida.
While flipping fixer-uppers seems to be taking off in our local neighborhoods, the impact on supply should also be considered, despite the trend reflecting how desirable the Tampa Bay area is to live in.
Season two of a Tampa-based HGTV show “100 Day Dream Home” follows couple Brian and Mike Kleinschmidt as they help homeowners build new homes from the ground up, often on land in the more rural areas of east Tampa like Plant City and Dover.
