Flip score
Flip score
Section titled “Flip score”Buy–rehab–sell. What it measures: resale liquidity, price appreciation, adjacent-price momentum, and renovation activity. Weights below are the current public stop-loss configuration (model p5v4-2026.07).
What feeds it
Section titled “What feeds it”Inputs are service-area percentiles across Cook + Lake (50 = median scorable tract). Definitions are maintained in the data dictionary.
| Factor | Weight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Resale liquidity block | 30% | Redfin, latest quarter, by ZIP |
| — sale-to-list ratio | 50% of block | do sellers get their price |
| — days-on-market (quartile) | 30% of block | exit speed |
| — sold-above-list share | 20% of block | bidding depth |
| 1-yr price appreciation | 15% | ZHVI year-over-year, ZIP-blended |
| Halo frontier | 15% | loan-size gap vs pricier neighboring tracts |
| Renovation + business momentum | 13% | Chicago permits (18 mo) + new licenses (12 mo) |
Allowed factors are renormalized. Applicant/household income and the current capital-flow composite are withheld from public scoring pending an income-free rebuild and review.
What it penalizes
Section titled “What it penalizes”- Within 1.5 mi of a financially distressed municipality: −22 points (−8 within 3 mi). Tax-base instability is an exit-liquidity risk.
- Within 1.2 mi of a point-of-sale-inspection town: −10. Closing friction on the resale.
Coverage damping
Section titled “Coverage damping”Below 70% source coverage, the score loses 0.5 points per missing coverage point — a thin-data tract cannot quietly outrank a well-measured one. Restricted income/crime fields do not improve public score coverage. If the allowed weighted inputs are entirely null, the tract is unscored (null), not zero.
Honest caveats
Section titled “Honest caveats”The liquidity block is ZIP-level, so a tract inherits its ZIP’s Redfin stats. Momentum is Chicago-only — suburban tracts carry no momentum signal. The weights are hand-set for face validity, not learned from outcomes; P3 replaces them with weights trained on forward 12-month appreciation and permit→resale spread pairs, and adds an explicit liquidity sub-score so a flip composite can never again ignore whether anyone actually buys there.