IRVINE, CA—Home flipping, including arms-length transfers in the for-sale apartment realm, hit a 10-year high in the year just past, ATTOM Data Solutions said Thursday. The firm's 2016 Year-End US Home Flipping Report shows that 193,009 single-family homes and residential condominiums were flipped in '16. That's up 3.1% from 2015 and represents the highest level since 2006, when 276,067 single-family homes and condos were sold for the second time within a 12-month period.

Flips represented 5.7% of all single-family home and condos sales during the past year. The percentage gain marks a slight increase from the year prior, when 5.5% of all transactions were flips, but is still below the peak established in 2005, when 338,207 single family homes and condos were flipped, representing 8.2% of all sales nationwide.

“Home flipping was hot in 2016, fueled by low inventory of homes in sellable or rentable condition along with a flood of capital—both foreign and domestic—searching for the returns and stability available with US real estate,” says Daren Blomquist, SVP at ATTOM. “The combination of more home flips and a greater share of financing for flip purchases resulted in a 19% jump in the estimated dollar volume of financing for home flip purchases, up to $12.2 billion for the flips completed in 2016,” representing a nine-year high water mark.