Home sellers in a handful of midsized metros saw the returns on their properties surge at the start of 2025 compared with a year ago—even as profits shrank nationwide.
Cities scattered around the Midwest, South, and Northeast—three of them clustered in Ohio—stood out for having the largest increases in typical profit margins from home sales between January and March, according to a new quarterly U.S. Home Sales report from ATTOM Data Solutions, a curator of land, property data, and real estate analytics.
The upswing in profit margins refers to the change in the difference between a home’s purchase price and sale price. For example, if you bought a house for $100,000 and then sold at the start of 2024 for $125,000, you’d walk away with a 25% profit margin.
If a different home you purchased for $100,000 later sold in 2025’s first quarter for $150,000, then your profit margin would be 50%. The increase in profit margin this year would then be 25 percentage points, from 25% to 50%.
Toledo, OH, saw the most dramatic increase in profit margins. At the start of the new year, the median price of a home sold in the Midwestern metro was 44.7% more than the median purchase price for homes sold, up from 27.8% during the same period in 2024.
The resulting 16.9 percentage point gain surge was the largest in the country in the first quarter.
“Homeowners in Toledo stand to see a significant profit from a home sale,” explains Realtor.com® senior economic research analyst Hannah Jones. “Buyer demand is strong in Toledo relative to available inventory, resulting in home price growth.”
Overall, home prices have climbed significantly in Toledo over the past few years, building homeowner equity and allowing sellers to cash in.
What’s more, based on ATTOM’s analysis of data from 128 markets with at least 1,000 home sales during the first quarter, Toledo had the second-largest annual increase in sales prices of 18.5%, reaching $160,000.
Toledo was followed by Birmingham, AL, where home sellers saw their return on investment go up 15 percentage points year over year, from just under 25% to 35%.
Canton, OH, registered the nation’s third-highest increase in home sale returns, up from 43.8% in the first quarter of 2024 to more than 53% at the start of 2025.
The sole Northeastern midsized metro, Syracuse, NY, came in fourth. There, homeowners saw their margins climb from 56.8% to 62.3% year over year. Meanwhile, the city in upstate New York led the nation in home sale price growth, up nearly 19%, to $214.950.
Youngstown, OH, rounded out the top five midtier markets, with profit margins from property sales there ticking up just under 6 percentage points, to 70%.
“Smaller, affordable metros continue to see high demand and price growth, resulting in strong profit margins,” notes Jones.
Profit margins on sales continue dropping nationally
Nationally, a typical homeowner made about a 50% profit selling a single-family home or a condo during the first three months of 2025—a drop of more than 3 percentage points from the previous quarter and nearly 5 percentage points from the beginning of 2024.
The national median profit margin has been in retreat for nearly three years now, but in good news for home sellers, it still remains well above pre-pandemic levels.
Looking at raw dollar figures, the median profit that sellers made on their homes ticked down 4% between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, from about $124,000 to $119,000.
“Sellers may not be enjoying quite the same windfall they were a few years ago, but by historical standards, profits are strong, both in terms of margins and raw dollar value,” said Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM.
Barber pointed out that the first quarter of the year tends to be its weakest, “so don’t be surprised to see profits regain ground during the summer months.”
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Snejana Farberov is a reporter at Realtor.com covering the U.S. housing market and the latest domestic real estate trends. She has worked as a general assignment journalist in New York City and Long Island for 16 years, writing for New York Post, Daily Mail, and News 12. Snejana earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Italian from St. John’s University, followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism.
Post courtesy of realtor.com.