Where Flips Actually Happen and What They Gross: House Flipping Margins by City

We took 6,963,756 sale pairs, every case in our records where the same property sold twice, and isolated the ones that carry the flip signature: purchased, then resold 3 to 24 months later at a higher price, with the resale closing in 2023 or later. That filter surfaced flip activity in 656 US metros, and 378 of them had enough volume for us to publish reliable medians.

Two headline numbers frame everything below. The national median gross margin is 37.3 percent, and the median hold is 10.3 months between purchase and resale.

What counts as a flip, and what gross means

Before the rankings, two definitions matter.

First, the flip signature. We require a resale 3 to 24 months after purchase, at a higher price, closing in 2023 or later. This catches classic renovation flips, but it also catches wholetail deals and teardown-rebuilds, and it excludes flips that sold at a loss, since we require a higher resale price.

Second, and more important: gross margin is the resale price over the purchase price. It does not subtract renovation costs, financing costs, holding costs, or selling costs. A 37.3 percent gross margin is not a 37.3 percent profit. On a real project, the rehab budget, lender interest, and commissions all come out of that number, and they routinely consume most of it. We wrote a full breakdown of what flipping actually costs, and every figure in this article should be read with that math in mind.

The cities with the most flips

Ranked by the number of qualifying flips, here are the 15 highest-volume metros in our data.

Las Vegas leads the country on raw volume with 3,662 flips, but its median gross margin of 28.5 percent sits well below the national 37.3 percent. Volume and margin are clearly different games. The Sun Belt metros on this list, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Jacksonville, Miami, cluster between 28.5 and 53.1 percent gross, while the older industrial metros, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, run from 73.2 percent up past 100 percent.

Holds in the top 15 are fast everywhere, ranging from 8.0 months in Phoenix to 12.1 months in Chicago.

Where gross margins run highest

Among the 378 qualifying metros, these 15 posted the highest median gross margins.

Philadelphia is the standout. Among the metros grossing above 100 percent it leads volume by a wide margin, 2,260 flips at a 105.0 percent median gross, close to three times the national median. Detroit is right behind it with 1,937 flips at 101.1 percent. These are not thin samples in obscure markets, they are two of the six busiest flip metros in the country.

One caution on the top of this list. Bethesda, MD grosses 124.0 percent on 161 flips, but it also carries the longest hold in the table at 13.9 months, and it is an expensive market. In high-priced metros, a purchase followed by a much larger resale within two years often reflects a teardown-rebuild, not a cosmetic flip. The gross margin is real, but the capital and construction behind it are in a different league, so read high-priced entries on this list as a mix of flip strategies, not one.

Where margins are thinnest

The bottom of the distribution is just as instructive. These are the 10 thinnest-margin metros among those with enough flips to qualify.

The pattern here is hard to miss. These are largely newer suburban markets, and every one of the ten held longer than the national median of 10.3 months while grossing a fraction of the national 37.3 percent. A 7.4 percent median gross margin, as in Fort Mill, leaves very little room once renovation, financing, and selling costs are paid. In markets like these, many of the resales in our sample probably netted close to zero or worse.

Reading the spread

The gap between the top and bottom of the margin table is 116.6 percentage points, Bethesda at 124.0 percent versus Fort Mill at 7.4 percent. A few things explain a spread that wide.

• •Margin lives in the purchase discount. The metros grossing 70 percent and up are dominated by older, lower-priced housing stock where deeply distressed properties trade far below their renovated value. That spread is exactly what our renovation premium study measures, and the distress language index shows where that discounted product comes to market. Newer suburbs simply do not offer that entry discount.
• •High-margin metros also move faster. Most of the top-margin list holds under 10.6 months, and Gwynn Oak turns in 7.2 months. The thin-margin list holds 10.7 to 16.9 months for far less gross.
• •The discipline changes by market. In a 105 percent gross market like Philadelphia, standard acquisition math like the 70 percent rule leaves real cushion. In a 7 to 11 percent gross market, the same formula will reject almost every deal, and it is probably right to.

Methodology

This study is built from our property records corpus: 6,040,171 property records scanned, yielding 6,963,756 sale pairs where the same property sold at least twice.

A flip is defined as a resale 3 to 24 months after purchase, at a higher price, with the resale closing in 2023 or later. We capped gross margins at 300 percent to screen out data errors and non-market transfers. That signature appeared in 656 metros, and 378 metros had enough qualifying flips to publish medians. The smallest sample shown in this article is 154 flips.

All figures are medians, half of flips in each metro did better and half did worse, and margins are gross, resale over purchase, before any costs. Metro coverage varies with our data density, so markets where our records are thinner may be underrepresented, and metro labels follow the city field in our records, which is why some entries are large suburbs rather than core cities. Figures were generated on August 14, 2026.

If you want to run acquisition numbers on a specific property rather than a metro, Resideline analyzes any address with the same sale-pair data behind this study.