PHILADELPHIA — By Alan J. Heavens
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
PHILADELPHIA — If you look at the trends among home buyers in the Philadelphia market, the Dolans appear to be a bit out of step:
Daniel Dolan, a chemical engineer, and wife Shaliz, an ob-gyn physician at Temple University Hospital, have just remodeled the kitchen in the townhouse they bought in July.
Instead of the “perfection” real estate experts say today’s buyers crave, the Dolans chose a house that needed work — a “fixer-upper,” for want of a better description.
“It let us buy more house,” Daniel Dolan said, and, just as important, “lets us put our personal stamp on it.”
Fix-up buyers are largely rare birds in a market with a huge supply of houses for sale and a continuing shortage of takers — tax credit notwithstanding.
In some markets that have seen huge price declines, “flippers” — those who buy cheap, renovate quickly, and turn houses around for profitable sale — are at work again.
Trends are tougher to nail down with any accuracy in the local market, where prices have dropped only about 11 percent since the housing downturn began, according to data from Philadelphia economist Kevin Gillen.
Flipping opportunities, though rare here, “are really the earmark of a stabilized market, where developers and rehabbers have come to the conclusion that the market has indeed bottomed out,” said real estate agent Mark Wade.
In this market, flippers are looking at the limited supply of foreclosures, short sales (in which the lender agrees to accept less than what is owed on the mortgage), and corporate relocations, seeking what Wade calls a “wholesale” price level.
Business
Today’s housing market is ripe for fixer-uppers
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