L.A. House Flippers Target the Hipster Crowd

Steve Jones, a Southern California real estate developer, bought a three-bedroom teardown in Los Angeles’s Glassell Park area last year. It was a risk—after all, this had been gang territory in the ’90s and was still on the border of gentrification. But Jones believed the fringe neighborhood on L.A.’s far east side was ready to attract a different kind of buyer. Over six months he gutted the home, installed marble countertops in the kitchen, put in a pool, and added an attention-grabbing orange front door. He hoped to sell the rehabbed property for $850,000—a lot of money, considering how far you have to drive for a decent cup of coffee. “The customer dictates the price,” he says during a walk-through of the house. “There’s an inexhaustible supply of hipsters in L.A. You saw the same thing happen in Brooklyn. The hipsters pushed out until they got to the water.”

Hipster is a nebulous, overused term, but L.A. brokers loosely define it as the segment of the city’s population that buys $10 artisanal chocolate bars, brings its own tote bags to the grocery store, and sports creative facial hair. With market confidence returning and interest rates near record lows—even after a half-point hike in mid-June—open houses are flooded with creative types searching for homes with a Dwell-ready look. Jones’s firm, Better Shelter, along with three other so-called hipster-flipper outfits, ModOp Design, Native Homes, and ReInhabit, is cashing in by bringing an artful take to the renovation game.