James Dainard, star of the A&E network show “Million Dollar Zombie Flips,” loves the eclectic style of Seattle’s old homes. He’s spent decades flipping them, restoring them beyond their former glory.
On his show, Dainard teams up with new flippers in the Seattle area, bringing the cash and an expert eye to help turn “zombie homes” into “million-dollar homes.”
The problem is that lately, those zombie homes are creeping toward million-dollar homes all on their own before any fixing is done. Add in the rising costs of construction materials and loans, and you’ve got yourself a flipping problem.
“It’s been very competitive,” Dainard said. “It’s a very hard business. It’s a very risky business, and it’s not always good times.”
As demand for land and affordable homes goes up in Seattle, so has interest in fixer-uppers, driving up costs. Builders want land for new development, and some first-time homebuyers are willing to make home repairs to break into the market.
That’s left flippers — people who remodel old homes and sell them for a profit — in a tough spot. High home and construction prices are diminishing their returns, according to the real estate data company ATTOM, causing a decline in the number of homes flipped each year in the Seattle area.
After a buying frenzy took place during the pandemic when mortgage rates dropped, the number of homes flipped in Seattle annually peaked at around 3,100 in 2021. Starting in 2023, that number declined. Seattle only saw around 1,900 flips last year — hundreds fewer than before the pandemic.
The difference between the flippers’ purchase price and the final sale price is shrinking dramatically. Since 2018, returns on investments for flipping in Seattle have fallen by more than a third — without factoring in renovation costs, according to ATTOM data.
In 2025, flippers in Seattle are selling renovated homes for 27% higher than their purchase price, on average. However, ATTOM estimates the cost of renovations and other flipping expenses to range between 20% and 33% of the property’s after-repair value.
“It truly just doesn’t pencil out if you want to do it in the correct, quality way,” said Mara Haveson, an experienced flipper and Seattle-area real estate broker who often helps flippers. “Property values are too high.”Flipping comes in many forms. There are homes that are livable but need a cosmetic upgrade. And then there are the homes Dainard buys — cobweb-covered, mold-encrusted, asbestos-riddled “zombie homes.”
No matter where homes fall on the spectrum of fixer-uppers, they all sell for serious cash as is. The Seattle homes Redfin categorizes as “fixer-uppers” have a median price of $800,000, and range from around $400,000 to over $1,000,000.
Between 2019 and 2024, the median prices of all homes in King County have gone up by around 41%, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service data, especially as land is becoming increasingly more valuable than the structure on it in the Seattle area.
Interest in fixer-upper homes has grown across the country. In September, the real estate listing website Realtor.com found homes specifically marketed as fixer-uppers receive 52% more views per property than similar older and more affordable homes.
That interest — from builders, investors and flippers — has made fixer-uppers more competitive and expensive, Dainard said.
He recently bought a home filled with trash and grime in Seattle. It was listed for $500,000 and bid up to $850,000, he said.His competition included a builder who wanted to add another home to the back of the lot, he said, which is possible thanks to new zoning laws allowing for denser housing.
That builder could have easily made over $2 million, Dainard said. But Dainard plans to sell it for $1.4 million after putting $275,000 into renovations. After taxes, insurance, utilities, closing costs and interest payments, he expects to net almost $97,000.
That’s if he’s lucky. He recently lost around $100,000 on another flip.
But occasional losses like that are to be expected, he said. The market conditions are rough for sellers of all kinds right now. Buyers are skittish, amid economic uncertainty, still-high interest rates and layoffs — leading to more inventory than usual.
Dainard said he still turns a profit despite the current market conditions for flips because he deals in bulk — he’s not just relying on profits from one or two flips.
“Those techies … that wanted to do that as a side project, make some money, that could be their one project where they lose $100,000,” he said.
Yet he’s seen more amateur flippers enter the market than big flippers over the last several years, he said. Feeling empowered with social media success stories, they may not realize they can quickly get in way over their heads if they take on anything beyond cosmetic upgrades.
“The people that are really in trouble right now are the ones that don’t understand construction,” he said. “I think people neglect that flipping is a real business and not a side project.”
In some cases, amateur flippers run into unexpected costs and patch up the home without doing much work, said Haveson, the broker. That’s not all flippers, but it is something buyers should be aware of, she said.
“Some flips have gotten a really bad rep because they cut corners and it’s shoddy,” she said. “It might look new and pretty for a little bit, but the reality is it was done in a not-quality way.”
Cost of construction
Although the number of homes purchased as flips has dipped, thousands of people in the Seattle area still try. For some, especially corporate workers, it’s a passion project, an opportunity to leave office life behind for a while and work with their hands.
Heather Maddox, a Seattle-area real estate agent, and her husband just finished their first flip together — a 1960s home in Renton with a view of Lake Washington. It was grueling, but she loved reimagining the floor plans of the old home and watching it turn into something beautiful day by day.
“It is just like a fun exercise to take something that has been neglected (with) so much deferred maintenance and updates and turn it into something almost new,” Maddox said.
But Maddox and her husband, who just sold the house, are making less money than they expected on the flip, partially due to unforeseen challenges, including asbestos and permit delays.
“It ended up being a much more expensive project than we realized,” she said.
Flippers are running into the same challenges builders everywhere encounter, Dainard said — high costs for construction and financing.The cost of borrowing money is rising across the board, but especially for construction. Flipping is a risky business, Dainard said, and lenders know that.
The average interest rate for a typical loan flippers use, called a fix-and-flip loan, has risen to 10.3%, according to CV3 Financial Services, a lending agency. Regular 30-year fixed home loans are around 6.3%.
Construction material costs have also soared in recent years due to inflation, supply chain issues, high demand during the pandemic and — now — tariffs. The real estate consulting company Cushman & Wakefield projects a 9% rise in construction materials costs and a 4.6% increase in total project costs due to tariffs.
One contractor working on a Seattle house that will appear on Season 2 of “Million Dollar Zombie Flip” said wooden support beams used to cost him $225 from a Kenmore supplier before tariffs on Canadian lumber. Now, those beams cost him $300.“I think construction, year over year, for flippers has probably gone up 10% at least,” Dainard said.
If a house requires major work, flippers can also run into new energy code requirements, adding more costs to renovations, Dainard said. The state updated its energy codes in 2021 and Seattle followed with stricter requirements.Many flippers don’t realize certain projects require replacing old systems with new, sustainable systems that can be more expensive in the short term, Dainard said.
Seismic upgrade work is also something flippers don’t realize they can run into. Retrofitting costs Dainard $10,000 to $20,000 per property, he said.
“There is really no profit in these right now,” he said.
Buyers willing to renovate
Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM, has another theory as to why the initial buy-in for properties that are ideal for flipping continues to rise.
“As prospective homeowners get priced out of the middle and high end of the market, they’re more likely to be competing with flippers over the same homes,” Barber said in a statement.
Dainard disagrees, saying that’s not true for the homes he flips, which are largely uninhabitable. But for habitable fixer-uppers, Haveson said, her clientele is shifting from flippers to homeowners who want to fix up the homes themselves and hold on to them. That’s a more lucrative option, she said.
Investors have always been buying fixer-uppers in Seattle, although they’ve bought just around 12% of homes in Seattle’s market this year, according to Redfin data. That’s a low figure compared with other parts of the country.
But young buyers, with energy and low budgets, also want those homes, Haveson said.
Multiple reports show younger generations are more likely and willing to do DIY home projects and buy fixer-uppers than older generations.
The high cost of turnkey homes, interest rates locking people into their current homes and the rising cost of professional renovation services have fueled a DIY boom — on social media, at least. Videos of young couples tearing out old cabinets and adding details like wooden paneling are flooding TikTok and Instagram.
Megan Murnane, 30, has been chronicling her home renovation journey on social media for the last year.“The turnkey homes were out of our budget and availability,” she said. “We felt like we were OK with being a little uncomfortable and updating some things to what we want.”
But they ran into competition. They were outbid on three properties before they finally secured a $785,000 house with no dishwasher and a damaged exterior. That’s a higher price tag than she wanted, but she was surprised her offer was accepted.
For the last year, she and her partner have spent every weekend and many of their evenings working on their home, oftentimes laboring into the night with headlamps.
The home renovations were more challenging than the pair expected. With no experience in home renovations, they had to learn as they went. One time, they accidentally shut off the water in their house for days.
“It was overwhelming or a little daunting at times, especially those first few months, we were like, ‘Oh my god, what did we get ourselves into?‘ ” she said. “Doing these projects ourselves was the only way we could afford it.”
But it’s all been worth it, she said. After living in apartments for years, she’s a homeowner in a walkable neighborhood she loves.
“Although it’s daunting, it’s been very rewarding,” she said.
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