Home flipping gets harder
And more of the week's best financial insight

A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
Home flipping gets harder
"More people are flipping homes, but they are making less of a profit," said Anna Bahney in CNN. There were more than 94,700 single-family homes and condominiums that were "flipped" in the third quarter of last year, meaning that they were bought at a discount, renovated, and then resold. That's the most flipping activity since 2006, according to real-estate data provider Attom. But the frenetic market wasn't exactly a flippers' paradise. Because of the nature of flipping, which can take months to complete, "many investors bought when home prices had shot up" but then struggled to offload at the peak of the market. The average gain on a flipped home was $68,847, or 32.3 percent, but much of that can be eaten up by the costs of substantial renovation.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Health plans add fertility care
More companies are adding fertility benefits to their employer health-care plans to lure workers, said Erica Pandey in Axios. A study by the recruitment firm Mercer last spring found that "11 percent of U.S. employers with more than 500 employees covered egg freezing in 2020, compared with just 5 percent in 2015." In addition, 27 percent covered the costs of in-vitro fertilization (24 percent in 2015), and 58 percent covered evaluations by reproductive doctors (54 percent in 2015). A "rise in the number of fertility clinics" has helped drive down the costs of some of these services, but employers are also beefing up their benefits packages to attract and retain talent.
Wells Fargo cheated in arbitration
A Georgia judge vacated an arbitration award previously decided in favor of Wells Fargo and questioned the securities industry group that oversaw the process, said Ben Eisen in The Wall Street Journal. An investor had brought the case against the bank "after losing some $1.2 million" in an investment strategy recommended by a Wells Fargo broker. The case went to arbitration, in which the agency that oversees the process, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), uses "a computer system to randomly generate a neutral list of potential arbitrators." But in this case, "multiple names were removed from the list at the request of Wells Fargo." Last week, Judge Belinda Edwards pointed to evidence that Wells Fargo and its attorney had fraudulently "misrepresented the prior testimony" of one of the witnesses.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
-
5 tips to save on heating bills
The Explainer Follow these expert recommendations for a cozy and cheap winter
By Becca Stanek Published
-
Should you fire your financial adviser? 4 signs it's time to say goodbye.
The Explainer Breakups are never fun, but you have to protect your wallet
By Becca Stanek Published
-
The daily gossip: Man arrested in connection with shooting of Tupac Shakur, an OceanGate movie is in the works, and more
Feature The daily gossip: September 29, 2023
By Brendan Morrow Published