Point Breeze Among Best “Bad” Neighborhoods for Home Buyers

With a gross return on investment of 138%, the rapidly changing Philly neighborhood is a house flipper's delight and a Millennial magnet, according to RealtyTrac. Now if the schools will get better....

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The good news: Ori Feibush is right. The bad news: Ori Feibush is right.

If a newly-released RealtyTrac analysis of property sales data in marginal neighborhoods across the country is any guide, we can expect continued fireworks in Point Breeze for years to come.

That’s because according to RealtyTrac, zip code 19146 is one of the “35 Best Down-and-Out Neighborhoods to Buy a Home.”

Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac analyzed data on 3,561 urban ZIP codes in the United States to come up with its list of 35 “Rough-and-Tumble Neighborhoods on the Rebound.”

As the ZIP code includes Graduate Hospital as well as Point Breeze, one could say that the area has already rebounded to an extent. But its flipping gross profit of $110,000 was the sixth highest in absolute dollar terms, and the 138 percent flipping gross return on investment landed it in the seventh-place spot on the list.

To make the cut for consideration, a ZIP code had to have at least 2,500 residents, an increase in the number of construction loans over the last 12 months, and an average gross return on home flipping of at least 60 percent. In addition, Millennials had to account for at least 25 percent of the population, and their share of the population had to increase from 2013 to 2014. Finally, the highest-scoring grade school in the ZIP code had to place below the statewide average, and at least 15 percent of the homes in the district had to be underwater, a figure above the national average.

How did Point Breeze stack up on these metrics? Well, as already mentioned, its flipping gross return on investment was the seventh-highest of all the ZIP codes RealtyTrac measured. Feibush himself probably accounted for the increase in construction loans, but other developers have also become active in the area. Millennials make up a whopping 36.6 percent of the ZIP code’s population, more than any other ZIP code in the top 35 save one in Grand Rapids, Mich., and 16.3 percent of homes were underwater in the first quarter of 2016.

“The underperforming school scores and inflated rates of underwater homes in these markets demonstrates they are lagging the housing recovery seen across much of the rest of the nation,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president of RealtyTrac parent ATTOM Data Solutions, in a RealtyTrac blog post on the list. “But it is clearly evident from this data that many individuals and institutions are betting on these hyperlocal housing markets to still bounce back.”

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