If House Flipping is “Dead,” How Is She Flipping 10+ Houses THIS Year?

0:00Some people seem to think house flipping is dead. Costs are up. Margins are gone. The glory days are over. But they're wrong. Some of the best opportunities we've seen in years are showing up right now in 2026. House flipping didn't suddenly stop working. The easy version of it did. And the investors who were too aggressive with their numbers and bit off a bit more than they could chew, they're being exposed. But for the rest of us, things are pretty good. Dominique Gunderson still does around 10 to 12 flips every year. And between the two of us, we've done over 100 flips and counting. The difference is we've adapted.

0:35Today, we're breaking down what has changed in the last few years and how investors are winning in this housing market. From smarter deal analysis and disciplined buying to renovations that maximize your ROI, we're sharing the exact framework we're using right now. Whether you're looking to do your very first house flip or just trying to make the numbers work again, this playbook has everything you need to find, buy, renovate, and flip houses profitably in 2026.

1:08Hey everyone, I'm Henry Washington, co-host of the BiggerPockets podcast, and today I'm talking with Dominique Gunderson. She's a real estate investor flipping houses and buying rental properties in New Orleans, Louisiana, So let's welcome Dom back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Dom, welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast.

1:25Henry Washington:Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this one. Perfect. And this is a great time to be talking about flipping because there's a lot of chatter out there in the real estate world about it. But before we get into that conversation, can you remind our audience who you are and kind of what your history is in the real estate space? Sure. Yeah, I got started in real estate straight out of high school, which was a little over 10 years for me now. So I've kind of done a few different things in that time, but started with the basics, just got my real estate license, kind of jumped in, learning the game, learning sales and marketing, did a little bit of wholesaling for about a year and a half, kind of get my feet wet in the investment space and then jumped full time into flipping.

2:09Henry Washington:So I did my first flip back in 2019 and have slowly scaled it up from there today, running 10 or 12 flips at a time, mainly flips, but I do have a little bit of a rental portfolio now as well. I do a very similar volume. I do 10 to 20 flips a year. So I think that makes us both pretty qualified to talk about this. And a lot of people are saying it's not a great market to be flipping houses in. So how would you describe the flipping market or the flipping landscape now that we're in the middle of 2026. Yeah, I think, man, a lot has changed since, you know, even just two or three years ago. But I'm sure you would agree since you're still flipping 10 to 20 houses a year.

2:53Henry Washington:It's not a bad market to flip. It's not a bad time to flip. There's tons of money to be made still in flipping right now. But things have changed in that the margin for error is so small right now compared to a couple of years ago. And so I don't want to put this term on anybody, but bad flippers are kind of being exposed with the current state of the market and have been for the last two years because, I mean, you literally can like barely make a mistake on a deal without losing money or breaking even or making five grand and you hope to make 50 or whatever. So So yeah, it's just changed a lot in the margin of error.

3:36Yeah, there's a lot of areas where I think flippers can make mistakes. But the first mistake that you make is typically the offer that you pay, right? Your offer price is going to be based on the ARV. So first of all, for me, it starts with comping.

3:51Henry Washington:Right. And I feel like there's so many nuances that you have to look at too with comps. like in 2021 and 2022, you could kind of just put renovated property into one big bucket. And as long as you kind of fit in there, you're good. Like you can, you can sell at the same price all those people are selling for. And again, this is like definitely market specific, but I think generally speaking, what I've noticed is buyers are just getting so, so picky. So you You have to be just as picky when you're looking at the comps. Like there's a reason why something sold today for the highest price in the neighborhood.

4:29Henry Washington:It's not just because it's quote unquote fully renovated. It's because it was probably designed by a professional designer and like everything looks perfect and beautiful and trendy. It's not just, you know, the gray and white rental grade colors, you know, it looks like amazing. And so if you're not going to match that level of design, you're not going to match that level of materials that you're putting in your property. You better not be using that comp and expecting that number. I totally agree with you. And so I don't know how you comp your properties. But for me, I have an agent comp mine and they give me a zone.

5:05Typically, it's a high, a medium and a low. And I am underwriting now at the ARV that falls somewhere in the mid to low end of that sale. because that way if I go and I list my property, when I go to run my comps again before we sell, if it's gone up a little bit, I may adjust. But I'm never trying to get the tippy top most money possible because I'd rather sell my house fast for less money than shoot for the stars and try to get the most money because sometimes it just makes your property sit on the market longer and then you lose your profitability to holding costs anyway and make the same amount.

5:44Henry Washington:Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I'm always underwriting, like you said, right in that kind of mid tier, not expecting the absolute highest. The other thing too, is I'm trying to underwrite my deal when I make the offer expecting what is my number going to be after I get like two price drops, after someone asks me for$10 ,000 in closing cost assistance, after I held the deal for like two months longer than I wanted to, all those things, that's my ARV that I'm basing my offer off of kind of knowing that like hopefully some of those things all of those things don't happen and we can pick back up some extra profit on the back end but the deal still underwrites if it does happen yeah I'm not trying to underwrite deals so it tells me to buy it like I'm trying to talk myself out of buying deals yeah I'm underwriting so conservatively that I want to talk myself out of it and then if it still says I'm going to make money, then it's probably a really good deal.

6:42So I think based on us just walking through that, what I'd like to do is to go through the different elements of underwriting a flip and talk about how we have adjusted those numbers for the 2026 market. And so the numbers I want to talk through with you are ARV, which we just did. Then we'll talk about commissions, closing costs, holding costs, renovation budgets, and profits. So we can dive into each one of those factors and talk about how it's affecting us in our business or how we've shifted when we're underwriting those numbers into our offer prices. But we're going to do that right after the break.

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10:36All right, we are back on the Bigger Pockets podcast and I'm with expert flipper Dominique Gunderson. She's done about 90 flips in her career so far and I've done several as well. And so we want to give you the things that you need to be looking out for as a flipper in this current marketer economy. We said before the break, it's not a bad market to flip. I actually think it's kind of the opposite. We're getting great deals right now because there's a lot of pain in the market and people still need to sell. And so I'm finding fantastic spreads. And it's, you know, flipping is a circle in my opinion, right?

11:11Like it's either very easy to find deals and harder to sell them or it's very easy to sell deals and harder to buy them. Like you just pick your heart.

11:18Henry Washington:Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So before the break, we talked about how we were handling our after repair values. So how we're comping properties to determine what the ARV is and how we've shifted doing that in this more challenging market. Next, let's talk about the cost. So we can kind of cover commissions and closing in one fell swoop since they're very similar. Have you adjusted how you're accounting for commissions and closing costs in this new economy? me? Yeah, I mean, I made a pretty big shift. Not that everyone can do this or wants to do this. But at the beginning of 2025, I went ahead and got my license.

11:54Henry Washington:And prior to that, I had never listed any of my own properties. But again, just kind of feeling the market tightening up and it being harder to make those spreads as mistakes get made. That was a huge, I mean, at least two and a half percent if you're paying five total, you know, that you can save on every deal, two and a half percent of your sales price, which is a lot. I mean, it works out to, for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that kind of get put back into the profit margins. And so that's been a big shift for me, both in just increasing profitability, but also I've actually found it extremely helpful in learning more about how to design the properties that it will best sell to buyers, what are buyers looking for, what's driving their decisions, even just things as like, how many times do they have to see a property or how many properties are they seeing before they make a decision?

12:48Henry Washington:Like you get all that feedback and data when you're the one that's getting the calls from the agents and all the feedback. And so being the owner, like that's invaluable feedback that it's just kind of hard for an agent as much as they want to send you feedback. Like they can't download absolutely everything to you you know that's a pretty cool i i agree with that not enough so that i'm gonna get my license but i think that that's a pretty cool perspective it's helpful that i flip out of state and i'm not there because so many of the tasks i have to delegate anyway it's mainly just like taking extra phone calls and a little bit more paperwork and stuff which you and i delegate a lot um and so but yeah i could see it if you were there like running around putting up signs, doing showings and all this stuff, just being a lot of extra time.

13:34For me, commissions and closing costs, I did not change. I always assume I'm going to pay 6 % in realtor commissions just because that's worst case scenario and I want to underwrite it worst case scenario. Now, I don't always pay 6 % commissions. My agent that I've been working with for a long time typically gives me a break on a percentage point or depending on the deal, it might be more or less. but I don't factor that into my underwriting. I just assume 6%. And then for my closing costs, I just take historicals. So I've closed enough deals now that I can look back and see what am I typically paying for closing costs on a house of a certain price point.

14:16And so I don't really have to guess at my closing costs. I can really be pretty specific about the closing costs. But they're underwriting for closing costs is they don't underwrite for the closing costs on the buy and the sell. They're typically only underwriting for the closing costs on the sale. Then they get hit with closing costs on the buy and then it wasn't in your numbers. And so that shrinks your profitability.

14:41Henry Washington:Yeah, I totally agree. I haven't really adjusted much on closing either, but yeah, just going from historical data. And for those of you who've never done a deal, obviously you can't use historical data, but you can have a title company estimate closing costs. So you don't have to guess. If you have the address of the property, you can typically send it to your title company and say, hey, can you run a preliminary HUD statement? I just want to see what my fees might be. And they can typically get you pretty close to the ballpark on what your closing costs will be. So that way you don't have to guess as much either.

15:14All right, next on the list is the rehab budget. This is the one that gets people because estimating rehabs is, it's kind of like a mix between an art and a science, right? Because we're talking about estimating. And even when you have a contractor do the estimation for you, it's still an art form. They're not actually doing the work yet. So it's a best guess. So how have you adjusted your rehab estimations in your underwriting?

15:45Henry Washington:I don't think I've done a ton differently as far as the estimate goes. Kind of similar to what you said for closing costs. Like I use a lot of historical data since we're using the same crews over and over again, the same type of product that we're putting out. It's kind of easy to look back at past projects. But I do think it's super important that you're adding in the proper contingencies because probably 70 to 80 percent or more of my rehabs have like major$10 ,000 plus surprises. It's just what happens. Like when you're pulling out walls, you're digging up under houses, you're looking at the plumbing, the old wiring like it.

16:26So you're saying you're saying 10K plus surprises, not 10K plus items, you know, are going to be there. these are just things that like 80 of your flips no matter what you budget for there's an extra 10k

16:38Henry Washington:hiding behind the wall somewhere yes almost always but so there's one there's one thing to say there's always a surprise that's ten thousand dollars that sounds crazy there's another thing to say that's very predictable yeah like you need to pad your you know major system renovation numbers knowing that there's going to be a plumbing surprise probably if there's not there's going to be an electrical surprise or, you know, whatever, a framing surprise, termite damage. Like if you know that you're getting into major projects that are going to have surprises like this come up, you just need to estimate the correct contingencies.

17:12Henry Washington:So for me, like what I like to stick to is if it's a project that I can fully inspect beforehand, like we get a chance to run cameras down the pipes, like get my contractor in there and everything. I think somewhere around a 10 % of your total estimated rehab cost is a decent contingency, which if it's$100 ,000 rehab, that's still 10 grand. On the other side of the scale, if it's a sight unseen by, or maybe you only got to drive by or look in the windows, you don't have any access and inspections, you should bump that up to like 20%, like literally double your contingency because that's a risky deal.

17:52Absolutely. For us, we have adjusted underwriting, but it's more because just labor and materials cost more now, right? Tariffs were a thing for a while, and that caused material prices to go up. So that meant our rehab budgets went up some. Plus, labor just is more expensive. I mean, it's economics, right? There's inflation. There's inflation with labor and materials as well. And I tend to overestimate my budgets from the standpoint of, again, I'm trying to price myself or talk myself out of doing a deal. And so us as flippers and in real estate investors in general, we all have a superpower, right?

18:28We all have things where we're like, oh, I get this cheap. I know a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy, right? Like I got a carpet guy. My carpet prices are dirt cheap. I've got a roof guy. I get roofs done. Dirt cheap. When I am underwriting my deal and putting together my renovation budgets, I'm not putting the Henry's special contractor roof deal price on my underwriting. I'm not putting my carpet guy's pricing on the underwriting. Because what if something happens and they fall off the face of the earth before I get to that part of the renovation? Or their price just magically goes up? I mean, have you ever had a contractor just magically charge you twice as much for something on a house that they didn't house before?

19:09happens all the time. So I never underwrite to those numbers. I always underwrite to market value on the renovation. And then if I can get it done cheaper, I will. So I underwrite to market value, even if I can get things done cheaper. And then I add a contingency on top of that. For me, I typically add a 10 % contingency because my numbers are pretty tight. But for a new investor, you're right, it should absolutely be higher. All right. So the last section I want to talk about is profit. Now, this is definitely different for different investors. I underwrite my profit into my offer price. So when I'm underwriting a deal, I'll say, okay, I need to take the ARV and then I need to subtract the commission, the closing cost, the holding cost, the rehab budget, and then I want to subtract how much money I'm going to make.

19:57That equals my max allowable offer, that's the offer price that I want to make. I have a rule of thumb for me in my market, but everybody's a little different. So my general rule of thumb is I want to make the same amount of profit as I'm spending on the renovation. And my thought process behind that is I want to be paid for risk to reward ratio. In other words, I'm assuming a higher renovation is a potentially riskier deal. It's more work. It's more level of effort. There's more moving pieces. There's more room for things to be found that are high dollar ticket items. And so I don't want to do a hundred thousand dollar renovation and end up with a$20 ,000 net profit deal, right?

20:40If I spend a hundred, I want to make a hundred. If I spend 60, I want to make 60. And I will adjust that rule. Like I'll bend that rule. If I'm more comfortable with that house, let's say I'm doing a three to 80s built, single family home, desirable neighborhood floor plan I've sold a million times and it needs a$70 ,000 renovation, I might be willing to make 30 or 40 of profit on that because I am so overly confident in that product selling. And the more confident I am, the less risky it is. So I'm willing to make a little less profit. So I might push that profit number down and make a higher offer to get that deal because of my confidence level.

21:26Now, if it's a house that's in a neighborhood, maybe I've never done a flip in before, layout's a little funky, I got to change some things. I don't know. If I'm doing a$7 ,000 renovation, I might need to be pretty close to that$70 ,000 profit number in order for me to do that deal because I see it as a little riskier. But that's how we manage it on our side. What are you looking at in terms of like what's your profit margin you'd like to hit when you're underwriting these deals?

21:52Henry Washington:Yeah, I like that you highlighted that every flipper does it differently. And even in every market, it can be so different. I usually target making a 15 % return on the total investment into the deal. So purchase and rehab and closing costs and some little fees in there. So if all in we're you know, spending$100 ,000, let's just say they're usually not that cheap, but I would want to make like 15 after everybody else is paid out on that deal. Lenders paid out, contractors, everything. I will push that up slightly. Like you said, if I don't feel as comfortable about the deal or I feel like the market is really shaky, maybe in that particular neighborhood, that particular floor plan, or even if I just have a ton of really good projects on my plate right now, and I don't really need another deal, I'm not going to buy one that has a less than good margin that I'm looking for.

22:53Henry Washington:I'm actually going to push it up to take on a slightly better, only slightly better deals. But that 15 % return on investment is kind of like the minimum that I try to underwrite with. That makes perfect sense. And that's a fantastic point. If you were as conservative as I am in your market, you probably wouldn't do many deals, right? Because people are going to be able to offer more than you and you'll lose out on deals. And that kind of leads us into the next part of the conversation, which is like, there are so many market intricacies that will shape you as a flipper in your flipping business.

23:30And yes, the fundamentals of flipping are all the same. We want to find a deal, buy it, add value to it, sell it, and make a profit. But the market-specific intricacies will really shape your business. Dominique came to visit me in Bentonville, Arkansas, and we got to compare notes. I took her to some of my properties, showed her what I had bought, talked to some of the numbers, and got to ask her about some of her deals. And it was so interesting because we would be walking through one of my properties, and I'd go, well, what do you think? And Dom would say, well, I'd never buy this, right? And not any shade.

24:08It wasn't a negative thing. And the reason was because our markets are so different, right? In Dom's market, she has more competition than me. There are more homes available per sale based on the amount of buyers that are looking to buy, which means buyers have a lot more options in higher market than they do in mine. When buyers have more options, you've got to know exactly what they want and you've got to be able to provide it to them and you've got to be able to provide it to them for cheaper than your competition provides it to them, right? And so it's just a different business setup. So Dom, can you talk to us a little bit about, hey, just kind of what that's like in your market?