The number of homes being purchased, rehabilitated and resold within six months was down last year in Arizona, even though nationally the practice known as flipping, increased 16 percent. Figures released Thursday morning by the home data company, RealtyTrac, show just over 6 percent of the homes sold in the state in 2013 were flipped. That is down from 8 percent in 2012, according to the company’s Vice President Daren Blomquist.

“Still the 6,800 properties flipped in Arizona in 2013, represented 6 percent of all sales. That’s still above the national average," said Blomquist. "Nationally properties flipped or homes flipped represented about 5 percent, just under 5 percent of all sales.”

Blomquist said the decline in home flipping, from 8 percent in 2012, is a good sign for the Arizona housing market. He said in a normal healthy market flipping should represent just a small percentage of homes sold.  Otherwise Blomquist said there is the chance of a price bubble being formed, because a lot of transactions are happening in quick succession, which he said is what led to the last housing crisis.

Blomquist said even so, there is money to be made.

“We looked at the average gross profit, which is simply the difference between the average price that the flipper bought the property at and what they sold it for and that average gross profit in 2013 was $53,000 per flip in Arizona, and that was actually up. In 2012, it was a $42,000 gross profit," said Blomquist.

Blomquist said however the $53,000 is the gross profit, meaning the costs of the home rehabilitation have to be subtracted from that total to determine how much the flipper actually made on the home.