Rise of the Anti-Flippers

One thing you've got to love about the markets: just when you think you've seen enough weirdness and wackjob behavior for three lifetimes, along comes some new twist to make you question your own sanity.

Today we're talking about anti-flippers, folks--the rise of which is steadily climbing. And where a flipper bought a cheap house in poor repair to fix up and sell at a higher profit, today the anti-flippers are buying cheap houses to fix them up...and hang on to them.

How do they make money at this, you ask? Simple--by using their newfound properties as rental properties.

See, those houses that went into the dirt-cheap-foreclosure-sale pile needed to go somewhere. The last thing the banks wanted was to own a raftload of steadily decomposing empty houses; it's bad press, bad for business, and karmically speaking it pretty much guarantees they're all going to die of blunt force trauma after being crushed by several dozen amorous gorillas with irritable bowel syndrome.

And, all those former homeowners now need a place to stay, and renting's looking a lot better than trying to get another mortgage in this credit-crunch economy. So the anti-flippers are taking their shot to buy up these deeply depressed-priced homes, fixing them up, and providing nice places for people to live.

Say one thing about a bad economy, it never fails to bring out the entrepreneur.