Homer Glen-based home rehabber Pawel Radzik paid $66,000 last year for the modest, three-bedroom ranch-style brick house on 141st Place, and he gave it a major overhaul, saying last week that “80% of it is new — new flooring, new cabinets, new plumbing, new electrical, new kitchen.” He then listed the home in January for $219,000 before cutting his asking price to $205,000 later that month and then to $199,900 in February…
Upon the naming of the pontiff, Radzik immediately pulled the house from the market and told Elite Street at the time that he was looking into “what is the best option for me,” regarding the home, given its newly discovered provenance and heightened prominence.
Now, Radzik and his listing agent, Steve Budzik of iCandyRealty, have teamed up with auction house Paramount, with a June 18 auction date. The house has a reserve price of $250,000, meaning that Radzik has the right to reject any offers below that amount…
What a new owner would do with the home is unclear — perhaps turning it into a shrine to the new pope, or alternately restoring it to how it might have looked when the pontiff was a boy. No one disputes that the house has no real equal, as Prevost is the first American ever to become pope, and the 141st Place house is the only home Prevost ever lived in while growing up.
Three things strike me from this news:
The house looks like a typical postwar suburban house in the Chicago area: modest in size by today’s standards and was in need of overhauling. And the community it is in has changed.
This house is famous because of someone who once lived there. What happens to such suburban houses? There must be many such houses in the American suburbs – even though no other ones can claim to be the home to such a religious leader – given the number of Americans who have lived in suburbs over the decades.
The increase in value is striking. Even before the announcement about the Pope, the home went from a purchase price of $66,000 last year to a sales price around $200,000 this year to a set minimum of $250,000 later this year. That a significant appreciation in housing value. Does this end up as a successful house flipping project?
I will be curious to see what the home sells for as it combines an aging yet rehabbed and more valuable home in the suburbs connected to a famous religious leader.
Homes that were resold within 12 months after being purchased made up 7.2 per cent of all transactions in the first quarter, the biggest share since the start of 2010, Attom Data Solutions reported Thursday. Meanwhile, the average return on investment, not including renovations and other expenses, dropped to 39 per cent, an almost eight-year low…
“Investors may be getting out while the getting is good,” Todd Teta, chief product officer at Attom Data Solutions, said in the report. “If investors are seeing profit margins drop, they may be acting now and selling before price increases drop even more.”
Three quick thoughts:
The return on investment for flipping a home is down. Changes in the real estate market mean there are fewer homes with large return potential. I wonder how much of the lack of such homes is due to fewer homes on the market versus sellers getting better at pricing their homes versus multiple kinds of investors driving up prices at the lower price points.
The return of investment of 39% sounds high…until you factor in “renovations and other expenses” which are not part of the figure. So what is the actual average return on investment once factoring in everything? 5%? 15%? This initial figure then helps make sense of the need of flippers to reduce expenses and make cost-effect renovations because those decisions directly connect to profits.
Thinking of the money in house flipping, I have seen little about the accuracy of HGTV shows and other shows that often provide a purchase price, expenses summary, and then give a profit at the end. Are those figures normal? Do they represent unusual housing markets and/or unusual advantages to being part of a TV crew doing house flipping?
The report by RealtyTrac found that home flipping in 12 active metropolitan areas last year was above a peak set in 2005, just two years before the U.S. mortgage market started to collapse, leading to a banking crisis and the Great Recession.
Profits generated by home flipping also hit a 10-year high, with home flippers netting an average $55,000 per sale before renovation and transaction costs. Profits topped $100,000 in expensive markets such as New York and Los Angeles…
There were also indications smaller investors were starting to pile in on the action. The number of home flippers rose to levels not seen since 2007, while the number of home flips per individual investor fell at the same time.
“When home flipping numbers go up, it is usually an indication that the housing market is in trouble,” said Matthew Gardner, chief economist at Windermere Real Estate, who was quoted in the report.
I blame HGTV. Seriously though, hasn’t there been a shift in the last decade or so to seeing house flipping as a more normal business that many people could get into? I hear radio ads regularly in the Chicago area for house flipping seminars where supposedly anyone can show up and learn the secrets. On one hand, you have professionals and firms that do this on a mass scale but you also have an increase in the number of flippers as people take on these projects to make some extra money or start a new business.
If this is pushing us toward another burst housing bubble, is there any way to reign in the flippers? Could local governments institute more regulations that would slow this down?
Legally Sociable 