Flippers also reduce the supply of housing units for the time they are unoccupied, which could be months or years, especially when sold to other flippers. More

Flippers also reduce the supply of housing units for the time they are unoccupied, which could be months or years, especially when sold to other flippers. More liquidity is not necessarily a good thing for the housing market, as it tends to increase the number of speculators on the market, contributing to a vicious cycle where more homes are being flipped between speculators than actually occupied by people who need them. It pains me to watch people apply simplistic theoretical laws of supply and demand to something as complicated as housing. The map is not the territory. There are massive costs to increasing supply, as well as psychological/community costs to moving homes, which are not cleanly captured in any Economics 101 textbook.