Hot States for Fix and Flip Investing

Ranking states by flipping activity is possible because one firm publishes the count. In its Q1 2026 U.S. Home Flipping Report, ATTOM put 64,348 homes and condominiums as flipped in the first quarter, about 8 percent of all home sales, and ordered the states by how common that was locally.

That ordering is the source’s, for that quarter, and it is worth understanding before it is worth using.

What a flipping-rate ranking actually counts

The number underneath every state’s position is a rate: flips as a share of all home sales in that state. So a state rises on the list either because more houses resold quickly or because fewer ordinary sales happened around them. Both movements look identical in the ordering.

The definition matters more than the arithmetic. ATTOM’s Q1 2026 methodology counts as a flip “any arms-length transaction that occurred in the quarter where a previous arms-length transaction on the same property had occurred within the last 12 months.” Read that twice. It is a test about timing and nothing else. It does not ask whether a permit was pulled, whether a wall moved, or whether anybody spent a dollar on the house between the two sales.

A property bought in March and resold in September with new paint counts. A property bought at auction and assigned onward untouched, well inside the year, counts. An inherited house sold twice through a family arrangement counts. The ranking is a resale-speed measurement wearing a renovation name.

The order as it was published for early 2026

For the first quarter of 2026, ATTOM’s state table ran: Georgia at an 11.1 percent flipping rate, Ohio at 10.8, Texas at 9.9, Missouri at 9.6, Utah at 9.3, Delaware at 9.1, Arizona at 8.9, Colorado at 8.8, Alabama at 8.8, and Tennessee at 8.7.

That is the list, in the source’s order, for one closed quarter. It is not this brand’s ranking and it is not a recommendation — repeating an ordering is not endorsing it.

Activity and return are two different orderings

Here is the part that does the most damage when it is skipped. Sort those same ten states by gross return instead of by activity and the table rearranges almost completely.

In the same Q1 2026 report, Tennessee — tenth by activity — showed the highest gross ROI of the ten at 49.6 percent, with Alabama beside it at 49.5. Delaware showed 36.4 and Ohio 35.2. Georgia, first on the activity list, showed 23.7. Texas, third by activity, showed 5.6 percent, and Utah, fifth, showed the same 5.6.

Two states can therefore sit three places apart on a “hot states” list and be nothing alike. The list answers where were houses turning over quickly. It does not answer where did the turning over go well, and the two questions have visibly different answers in the same dataset.

Gross is the word carrying the weight

Every return figure above is gross, and the report is unusually direct about what that excludes. Its methodology states that gross flipping profit is the difference between purchase price and resale price, “not including rehab costs and other expenses incurred, which flipping veterans estimate typically run between 20 percent and 33 percent of the property’s after-repair value.”

Note who is speaking in that clause. The range is not ATTOM’s measurement; the report attributes it to flipping veterans, and it is reported here the same way. The load-bearing half of the sentence is the first half: the headline return excludes the cost of the work. Nationally the typical gross margin was 25.4 percent in that quarter. What that becomes after the rehab is a question about a specific house, and no national median knows anything about one.

What makes a market busy sits outside the table

Ask why a state is busy and the ranking goes quiet, because activity is an output. The inputs are ordinary and local: how old the standing inventory is, how long listings sit, whether the permitting authority is the state or the town, how long inspections take, and how much of the year weather allows exterior work.

None of those is in the table, and none of them is a number this brand will attach to a market. They are the things worth asking about before a rate means anything.

They also move independently of the ranking. A state can climb the table in a quarter when ordinary sales dry up and the flip count holds steady, which is arithmetic rather than opportunity. It can fall in a quarter when the overall market gets busier around an unchanged number of quick resales. Neither movement tells an investor anything about whether a house three streets away is worth buying, because the denominator changed and the houses did not.

The practical consequence is that a ranking is most useful read backwards. Rather than asking which state to enter, ask what a state’s position is made of: whether the flip count rose, whether ordinary sales fell, and whether the answer is the same this quarter as last.

Real-World Scenario: Two investors compare notes on states from the same published list. One works in a market where the building department is municipal, plan review runs quickly, and the crew can be on a roof most months of the year. The other works two states away, where adoption of the code is local, the inspection queue is longer, and exterior work stops for a stretch of the winter. Their properties are similar, their scopes are similar, and their holding periods are not remotely similar — because the calendar is set by a permit office and a weather pattern rather than by a spreadsheet. The list put both markets in the same band. Nothing in the list was ever going to tell them that.

The peril profile is the part that reaches the policy

The place a market ranking does connect to insurance is the peril profile, and that varies by state in ways a state’s own regulator publishes.

Tennessee is the clearest example on this list. The state’s own department notes that Tennessee has two seismic zones — the New Madrid zone in the west and the East Tennessee zone in the east — and states that traditional policies do not cover earthquake damage, which is why that cover is arranged separately. The Tennessee page carries how that sits beside the rest of the state’s position, and the mechanics of the exclusion itself are the subject of the earth movement post.

Texas sits third on the activity list, and the Department of Insurance sets out in its consumer guidance that flood is not covered by the standard property form and is placed separately. The Texas page carries that framing.

Ohio is second, and the state’s department describes severe convective storm — wind, hail, tornado — as the family the standard form is built around, which the Ohio page sets out in full. Where hail is the working peril, the deductible is often the term that matters most, and percentage wind and hail deductibles explains why a percentage behaves differently from a flat sum during a rehab.

The same exercise runs through the rest of the list — the Georgia and Arizona pages carry their own regulators’ words, and every state on the table has a page that does the same.

Reading a ranking next to a scope of work

A ranking describes a market. A policy responds to a building. The bridge between them is the scope of work, not the state.

Whether a project needs builders risk or something narrower turns on what is being done to the structure — and that decision is the same in a state at the top of the list as in one that never appears on it. What the state changes is the peril the building sits in and the market that answers for it.

That distinction is worth holding onto, because it cuts against how market lists are usually read. The ranking varies by geography and the policy question varies by scope, and the two are close to independent. A cosmetic refresh in the busiest state on the table and a cosmetic refresh in the quietest one raise the same coverage question; a structural rehab in either raises a different one. Geography decides which perils are in play and which market writes them. It does not decide what the work is, and the work is what the form responds to — a seam the builders risk comparison takes apart in detail.

There is a timing point here too. In the same quarter, the typical flip took 165 days from purchase to resale — a span that crosses seasons in most of the country, and the exposure runs for all of it, whatever the state’s position on any table.

What survives the next quarter

Rankings move. The definition does not, the exclusion pattern does not, and the questions do not.

Ask what the count measured. Ask whether the return figure is gross. Ask which perils the state’s own regulator treats as separate placements. Then ask what the scope of work actually is, because that is the question the insurance side of a project turns on, and it is the one a table of states was never built to answer.

Where the work is genuinely cosmetic, the cosmetic repair endorsement is the narrower instrument that sometimes answers instead. The broader mechanics sit in the fix and flip insurance overview and in what house flipping insurance covers. When the scope is settled and the market is chosen, send us both — the state and the scope of work together, because neither one answers the question on its own.