Super Flippers

Think you can play with the big boys and girls?

I mean the REALLY big players who are flipping foreclosures for millions at a pop.

Sounds like a reality show? Perhaps it will be but some day but right now super flipping might be the hottest thing going in residential real estate investing. It’s certainly not for everyone, but conditions are remarkably favorable for investors with the cash to buy and the nerve to market the most expensive foreclosures in America.

When anecdotal reports of multimillion dollar flips hit the media last month, they were driven by word-of-mouth and tales of individual, localized deals. However, now a new study released Wednesday by RealtyTrac has put some hard numbers and market analysis behind the war stories. The number of ultra high-end properties worth more than $5 million with a foreclosure notice rose 61 percent from the same time period in 2012 to a total to date of nearly 200 properties, a tiny percentage of the 1.2 million homes that went into foreclosure this year. However, these 192 homes represent a 61 percent increase of super high end defaults over 2012.

In an interview, RealtyTrac’s Daren Blomquist said lower price foreclosures, even those in the $1 to $2 million and $3 to $5 million brackets, did not experience the same uptick as the very top properties. In fact, the 2013 increase in fancy foreclosures is a deviation from recent years, when the numbers of high end defaults have declined steadily along with lower price tiers since 2010, when ultra high-end foreclosures over $5 million peaked at 431.

Uptick in Super Foreclosures

The uptick on super foreclosures may be just a one-year phenomenon, possibly related to market and political conditions in Florida and California, which together accounted for more than 60 percent of …read more