Where are home flippers most efficient?

Time is money, and home flippers in Maryland know that.

In the second quarter, Maryland home flippers were the most efficient in the country, according to an analysis by The Real Deal of data from Attom.

These investors had the highest ratio of their gross return on investment compared to the time it took to sell their properties. (Attom defines a single-family home or condo sale as a flip if it occurred within 12 months, and the data firm calculates gross ROI by dividing the gross profit on a median sale by that sale’s price. Attom also included only states that had 50 flips in the second quarter.)

In other words, it took Maryland flippers an average of 169 days to sell, presumably, their rehabbed homes while generating a gross return on their investment of 75 percent.

Maryland’s time to flip was slightly above the national average of 165 days and was the 12th-lowest in the U.S. The lowest average time belonged to Georgia, at 132 days.

But Maryland’s return of 75 percent was the highest in the country in the second quarter, catapulting the state to the top of the flipper-efficiency standings.

Maryland was second last year, in terms of efficiency, to Delaware, whose flippers generated a return of 100 percent in 151 days on average. As for Maryland, flippers there turned out an ROI of 78.6 percent in an average of 164 days. Delaware has since fallen to the middle of the pack.

Montana, meanwhile, had the unfortunate distinction of the least efficient state for home flipping in the second quarter. It was the only state that saw a negative gross return on investment: -1.4 percent.

Nationwide, the efficiency of home flippers peaked in the third quarter of 2012 — when investors generated a gross ROI of 62.9 percent in an average of 149 days — then generally has fallen since then. 

In the second quarter of this year, U.S. flippers took an average of 165 days to sell to generate gross ROI of just over 25 percent — the lowest return since 2008.

Home flipping accounted for 7.4 percent of U.S. residential sales in the second quarter, close to the percentage of sales at the same point last year but down from 8.3 percent in the first quarter of 2025.