We Buy Houses Hummer vehicle

I suppose the military imagery is appropriate.

Over the past couple months, the Wall Street Journal had published a number of articles about house flipping and how increasingly it's a phenomenon driven by larger corporations backed by financing from Wall Street firms.

-- "House Flipping Is Back to Pre-Crisis Levels"
-- "Zillow Ramps Up Home-Flipping"
-- "House Flipping Is Back to 2006 Levels. Should We Worry?"

I think of this kind of system as a form of what urban sociologists call "reproduction of space."  They are referring to the process of neighborhood and place change, and what some people call gentrification.

But it is also about neighborhoods and places and at the scale in which they are "relevant" and integrated into the production, development, marketing, and sales system.

In the context of residential real estate, I call it the regional residential housing landscape.

What it means in a practical sense, is whether or not a particular neighborhood is on the radar, is in demand, at a larger scale.  How a neighborhood in Capitol Hill or Bethesda, Arlington, or Alexandria will be considered equally by certain demographics, who wouldn't consider Mount Rainer, Hyattsville, or Deanwood.

Similarly, I witnessed this with H Street revitalization c. 2003-2004.  Once the city released a plan for the commercial district's revitalization, major real estate information and brokerage firms like Marcus & Millichap went in and compiled information on every property.

Once the district's data was organized and available, it became one more node or distinct "submarket" in a regional/national/international real estate property development system.

With national firms active in flipping, houses will get necessary rehabilitation, but this process will also result in a significant upward repricing of neighborhoods.

And a change in the nature of the actors, from one-off actors to more organized players.