“Move-in-ready” carries its own cachet. But when it comes to prospective homebuyers’ online home searches, “fixer-upper” gets the clicks more often than not.
Life is not a focus group, but the volume of searches on Realtor.com promising a future date with Home Depot or Lowe’s more than tripled from July 2021 to July 2025, reflecting a shift in buyers’ expectations over four long years of steepening homebuying costs.
“Taking on less debt by buying a less expensive home and putting in the work to add value is a more attractive option in this high-rate environment,” a new Realtor.com report reads, “and we see the pace of fixer-upper sales accelerating relative to their competitors.”
Realtor.com deployed a large language model to compare tens of thousands of home listings overtly described as fixer-uppers with others on the market of a similar age and square footage priced below the median. The model was trained to match overlapping sentiments in listings, like “renovation-ready,” “could use some TLC,” “good bones” and “bring your imagination,” to list a few.
“Listing page views per property for fixer-uppers are 52% higher for homes marketed as fixer-uppers than for similar homes not marketed that way,” Realtor.com found. Sellers have different timelines to sell, but those “willing to advertise a lower price for their home and market it as a fixer-upper may find more success with online home shoppers than if they put in the time and money themselves to market it as move-in-ready,” they added.
Economic headwinds
According to the National Association of Realtors, the typical U.S. household earned roughly 46% less than recommended to afford a median-priced home ($439,950) in July, when employing a common measure of affordability. Nevertheless, by some measures the summer housing market was tilted in favor of buyers more heavily than any since July 2021.
With national for-sale inventory near multiyear highs and purchase demand tepid, listing a property as a “fixer-upper” likely helps motivated sellers vying for the attention of affordability-minded home shoppers.
Homes identified as fixer-uppers had a national median listing price of $200,000 in July 2025, while the median listing price for all single-family homes was $436,250, granting fixer-uppers a 54.2% discount. The typical fixer-upper has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and was built in 1958.
Still, ballooning housing inventory means fixer-uppers now make up a smaller share of single-family homes on the market than four years ago. There were 79,175 fixer-uppers for sale in July 2025 compared with 66,619 in July 2021, an 18.8% increase. But fixer-uppers now account for 5.2% of listings compared with 6.1% four years ago.
And the fixer-upper market may face stiffer competition moving forward, as prices soften somewhat at the entry-level end of the market. Whether turning around a dream home or flipping for a profit, fixer-uppers face twofold demand from owner-occupied buyers and home investors, each chasing bang for their buck but to different ends.
Home-flipper profit margins slid to 17-year lows in the second quarter of 2025, recording a typical gross return on investment of 25.1% according to real estate analytics firm Attom. Flippers averaged 13.6% lower gross profits in the second quarter of 2025 compared with the second quarter of 2024.
The cost of home repairs and remodeling in the second quarter rose 3.43% year over year, according to the Q2 2025 Repair and Remodel Index published by the data analytics firm Verisk. The index tracks costs on over 10,000 line items ranging from windows to appliances — many of the same expenditures for owner-occupied buyers eyeing fixer-uppers as their path to homeownership.
U.S. metros with the largest share of fixer-upper sales among total single-family home sales in July were Syracuse, N.Y. (11.5%), Toledo, Ohio (10.3%), New Orleans (10.2%), Jackson, Miss. (10%) and St. Louis (9.9%).
Areas where the so-called “fixer-upper discount” was widest in July compared to the median area single-family listing price included Jackson (77.7%), St. Louis (68.3%), Birmingham, Ala. (67.7%), Pittsburgh (67.5%) and Toledo (65.9%).
