Home flippers are still booking nice profits, if they can find the right house

• Home flips are generating more profit but on fewer properties, according to Toorak Capital Partners.
• Toorak, which has financed $10 billion in investment loans, has seen volumes drop since mid 2022.
• Before buying, investors are weighing rising construction costs and home price uncertainty.

House flipping, a quick-buck pastime of real-estate investors new and seasoned as prices soared during the pandemic, has reverted to an expert's game.

More than a year of quickened inflation, rising borrowing costs, and shaky home prices in some parts of the country have provoked a new sense of caution among real estate investors, who are sharply cutting back on projects, according to the CEO of Toorak Capital Partners, one of the industry's largest finance companies with more than $10 billion loans purchased since its founding in 2016.

Following the overall drop in home sales, Toorak's volume has dropped consistently since peaking in the second quarter of last year, said John Beacham, the CEO who founded Toorak and won backing for the business from private equity giant KKR. Last quarter, Toorak's volume was the lowest in five years, excluding a temporary drop during the pandemic, according to the company.

But for the flips that are happening, they're plenty profitable, Beacham told Insider. Of the projects funded by Toorak last quarter, the company said investors generated profits of 32% and $149,000, on average, up from 27% and $115,000 a year earlier.

Some investors see their best returns by holding the properties for the long term and capitalizing on high rents, he said, a practice that Zillow's chief economist asserted was the more prudent investment strategy given today's higher mortgage rates and uncertain home price outlook.

The investors, Beacham said, just have to be pickier. A lot pickier.

"You just have to pass a lot more deals," he said. "If you were an investor a year ago you'd see 100 deals and you did 20 of them. And probably now, you see 100 deals and you do 10 of them."

Toorak's data on profits bucks the trend shown by real-estate data provider Attom, which has shown profits on properties bought and sold within a year are slipping. Beacham said Toorak's data more precisely measures the projected outcome of rehab projects because, as a creditor, it has proprietary knowledge of what is a true rehab transaction and the costs of those projects.

Investors are far more discriminating of the limited inventory because they see their own costs rising, Beacham said. Because Toorak is funding lenders, all projects he sees require financing, and those costs have jumped. Building materials prices jumped by 18.9% in 2021 and 8.3% in 2022, though they've since stabilized, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Flippers have to be more mindful of the slowdown in home price appreciation, or home price declines, too.

Aria Khosravi, a real-estate investor who's done 91 home flips with partner Alan Blue since 2009, in March gave Insider's Kathleen Elkins a list of considerations to be successful in 2023. Topping that list: know how much the renovations will cost.

"If you can't identify what the true cost is going to be to resell the home and if you don't know how much it's going to cost to fix it up, you're going to be in a tough spot out of the gate," Khosravi said. "You'll just be keeping your fingers crossed, hoping it works out."

To be sure, some of the risks for flippers have eased, according to Beacham. While lofty, inflation has ebbed and mortgage rates have stabilized, he said. Building materials prices have come off their 2022 highs, too. He anticipated that flipping volumes will bounce back.

"It's easier for people to be confident about what it's going to cost to buy the windows in six months than what it would have been a year and a half ago, because overall inflation — and especially construction inflation — has moderated significantly," he said.