A headline landed on my desk recently that made me do something I rarely do, and that was to agree with a London-based commentator…well, for almost three seconds.

“You can’t make money from flipping anymore,” it declared, citing Hamptons research and HM Land Registry data. The piece painted a grim picture: flipping volumes at a decade-low, gross profits down 55% since 2015, and stamp duty eating 43% of what’s left. Reading it, you’d think the entire strategy was left dead in the gutter with no hope of redemption.

If you only buy and sell property in London and the South East, then that assessment might be fair. But here’s the thing — most property traders in this country don’t focus on those areas, at least not exclusively.

The article in question, based on Hamptons’ analysis, was well researched. I won’t dispute the data. But data without context is just noise, and the context missing from this particular narrative is the one that matters most to readers of this magazine: where you buy, how you buy, and what you buy it for.

Let me offer a different lens.

The numbers they didn’t lead with
Buried within that same Hamptons dataset was a regional breakdown that told a very different story. While gross profits on flipped homes in the Southwest has collapsed by 80.3% since 2015 and the Southeast fell 78.4%, the Northeast actually increased by 27%. The Northwest was virtually flat at -1.9%.

In London, gross profit after SDLT dropped from £100,570 to £35,720, resulting in a 64.5% decline, and nearly half of that fall happened in the last year alone. That’s the figure that drives the headline. It’s dramatic, it’s attention-grabbing, and it’s about as useful as a chocolate teapot.