Every year someone publishes a list of the "best cities to flip houses." The problem: a city isn't a market. Inside every metro there are zip codes where flips print money and zip codes where they quietly lose it. Here's how to tell them apart with numbers, not headlines.
1. Volume: enough sales to trust the comps
A great margin on paper means nothing if there aren't enough recent sales to back up your ARV. Look for zip codes with steady turnover, where several comparable houses have sold in the last six months. Thin markets mean thin comps, and thin comps mean an ARV you can't defend to a lender or a buyer.
2. The spread: distressed price vs. renovated value
This is where the money is. Compare what tired, as-is houses sell for against what renovated houses on the same blocks sell for. A wide, consistent gap, say $60K to $80K on similar houses, is a flip market. A narrow one means buyers won't pay much of a premium for your rehab.
3. Days on market and price cuts
Listings that sit 30+ days and take a price reduction are where motivated sellers live. A zip code full of them tells you sellers are flexible. A zip code where everything goes under contract in a weekend tells you you'll be bidding against everyone.
4. Buyer depth at your exit price
Who buys the finished house? First-time buyers on FHA loans, move-up families, investors buying turnkey rentals? Make sure there's a deep pool of buyers at your ARV, not just one or two sales at the top of the range.
5. Distress density
Count the off-market signals: tax delinquent owners, pre-foreclosures, probate estates, vacant houses, code violations. Zip codes with a lot of them have a steady supply of owners who need to sell, and many of those houses never hit the MLS.
What to watch for
The best markets right now are the ones where these lines cross: a wide spread, enough volume to trust the comps, and a steady supply of motivated sellers. Deal Sherpa's distress lists show those signals house by house in every market it covers, and its Deal Search flags price-reduced MLS listings automatically, so you're not hunting manually.
DealSherpa Team
