Upper Darby Among Nation’s Top 30 in Hipster Home Flips

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32 Merwood Dr in Upper Darby
This property at 32 Merwood Dr in Upper Darby is currently on the market for $174,900 (Photo via realtor.com)

RealtyTrac, the nation’s leading source for comprehensive housing data, recently released its 2015 U.S. Home Flipping Report, and it reveals that Upper Darby ranks 28th in the country in what it calls hipster home flips.

Using average flipping returns along with demographic data from the U.S. Census, RealtyTrac identified the Top 30 hipster zip codes nationwide for profitable home flipping. All 30 of the zip codes met five criteria that brand them not only as hipster hot spots, but also as highly profitable for home flipping.

Five of the 30 zip codes on the list are in Philadelphia.

Some of the criteria used to define “hipster” were percentage of the population aged 20-34 and the percentage who walk or take public transportation to work.

According to RealtyTrac, “hipsters typically aren’t looking for just any place to live; they are looking for a place that matches their particular vision of what a city, a neighborhood and a home should look, sound, feel, smell, and taste like.

“When they find that vision, they are willing to pay a premium to experience it, which represents a boon for home flippers operating in those areas appealing to the hipster aesthetic – especially given that many of the hipster hot spots are urban core neighborhoods with plenty of older homes in need of major renovation.”

For the report, a home flip is defined as a property that is sold in an arms-length sale for the second time within a 12-month period, based on publicly recorded sales deed data collected by RealtyTrac in more than 950 counties accounting for more than 80 percent of the U.S. population.

The share of homes flipped in 2015 increased from the previous year in 83 of 110 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas nationwide analyzed for the report (75 percent).

“As confidence in the housing recovery spreads, more real-estate investors and would-be real-estate investors are hopping on the home-flipping bandwagon,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at RealtyTrac. “Not only is the share of home flips on the rise again, but we also see the flipping trend trickling down to smaller investors who are completing fewer flips per year.”

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