Goodwin says lender metrics show steady growth as flippers eye Florida and Midwest for fresh opportunity
Fix-and-flip investors have been navigating a difficult stretch for several years in a row. Elevated mortgage rates have suppressed resale home sales to near all-time lows, price appreciation has slowed to a crawl, and the gap between what flippers expected from the market and what they actually got has worn on sentiment.
Data from one of the nation’s biggest fix-and-flip lenders shows some of that frustration. The most recent Burns + Kiavi Fix and Flip Market Index fell to 59 in the second quarter of 2026, down from 63 in the first quarter, as a 40- to 50-basis-point jump in mortgage rates weighed on demand.
Texas and the Southeast were the weakest regions, and the share of flippers selling below their after-repair-value estimates rose to 21% from 17% the prior quarter.
However, the picture may not be as bleak as the data indicated, according to one Kiavi executive.
Charles Goodwin (pictured top), VP and head of bridge and DSCR lending at Kiavi, said what he’s seeing from the current market might not completely line up with the survey data.
"The Q2 survey largely lined up with my expectations," Goodwin told Mortgage Professional America. "I would say it read a little bit more bearish than we're actually seeing on the front lines. From our perspective as the lender, we're seeing growth year-over-year in our fix-and-flip loan volume, and we are seeing steady delinquencies and losses. So, the origination volume is growing, and the loss volume is steady. Our metrics read slightly less bearish."
Flipper fatigue
Goodwin said the gap between what flippers report in surveys and what shows up in actual lending data is less about a fundamental market breakdown than about years of unmet expectations wearing on sentiment.
"I would call it fatigue from flippers," he said. "You're in a market where the volume of flips going on has been flat for a while now. We're going on almost 4 years where resale home sales are near all-time lows in the low 4 million range. And we went from a couple of percentage points of home price appreciation in 2023 to a couple less in 2024 to effectively no price appreciation in 2025."
While economists have consistently called for falling mortgage rates over the last couple of years, the reality of the market has been much different. Geopolitical unrest and energy inflation have pushed rates up, keeping the headwinds strong for flippers.
"It feels like for the past three or four years, you're heading into the following year saying, ‘Yeah, this is going to be the year where things are going to be calm geopolitically, inflation's going to drop, rates are going to drop with it,’" he said. "It's been the story or the hope for 3 or 4 years now, and then it just hasn't happened."
Finding the silver lining
Goodwin said the slow resale market creates an advantage on the buy side that partially offsets the pressure on the sell side.
In a more active market, a flipper might compete against ten other buyers for a property, but in the current market they may compete against fewer and purchase prices reflect that. A flipper who buys a property 2% below what they would have paid in a stronger market can compensate for 2% less appreciation on the exit, keeping the profit-and-loss equation roughly intact.
Regionally, Goodwin said the Midwest and Northeast have been consistent performers for two to three years. The more interesting regional story heading into the second half of 2026, he said, is Florida.
"Florida is trending now back in the opposite direction, meaning in a more positive direction," he said. "If you look at the amount of resale inventory in various Florida markets on a year-over-year basis, Florida leads the way with six or seven large markets having 10% or even 20% declines in inventory year over year. What that means is there's less downward pressure on prices in those areas. We're seeing a state like Florida actually start to trend in the opposite direction."
On flipper profiles, Goodwin said the survey's finding that larger, experienced flippers are outperforming smaller ones tracks with what Kiavi sees internally, since larger operators have more pricing power with vendors and contractors. But he pushed back on the idea that the market belongs to large operators.
"From our standpoint, we still see the inexperienced market for flippers being larger than the experienced market just by a little bit," he said. "More flip transactions occur nationally from inexperienced relative to experienced. It might be 55% inexperienced and 45% experienced. It is still a very, very large market, and a majority of the flips going on are still done by mom-and-pop."
Goodwin said the slow market has pushed the investors who stayed active to sharpen their operations in ways a stronger market would never have forced.
"What a tough market does is it forces you to hone in on some of the components of your operation," he said. "If you were completing a flip in 180 days, well, maybe you need to complete it in 120 days, and you've been able to tighten your operational processes to do that. What slowness in the market does is it forces people to evolve, and we are seeing our clients do exactly that."
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