Fixer-uppers have become a force to contend with on the market, with the amount of for-sale listings identified as “fixer-uppers”—hot and high-priced—expanding 12 percent in the last five years, according to a recent Zillow analysis.
 
The reason? Buyer competition could be giving sellers the go-ahead to list their home “as-is,” says Zillow Chief Economist Svenja Gudell. Lacking inventory allows sellers the flexibility because the home will likely sell either way.
 
“Across the country, homes are selling fast and for high prices,” says Gudell. “Sellers are in the driver's seat, with the freedom to list their home for sale 'as-is' without worrying about price cuts or the home sitting on the market—and without sufficient new construction, the housing stock has aged, so homebuyers are finding more and more homes on the market in need of a little TLC.”
 
The amount of high-priced fixers on the market has grown since 2011—close to 35 percent, according to the findings of the analysis. The amount of lower-priced fixers, on the other hand, has grown only about 3 percent.
 
In Seattle for example, for-sale inventory has shrunk 10 percent over the past five years, even as fixer inventory has risen 33 percent.  
 
The age of the typical home sold, in addition, has doubled in just nine years—in 2006, homes were 15 years old; by the end of 2015, the median age jumped to 28 years, according to the findings of the analysis.
 
To conduct the analysis, Zillow identified the number of fixer-upper homes listed for sale beginning in 2011 and ending in 2015, and compared them to overall for-sale inventory trends. To identify fixer-uppers, Zillow mined historical listing descriptions for phrases like “fixer-upper,” “TLC” and “needs work.”
 
For more information, please visit www.zillow.com.

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