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LOS ANGELES (AP) — It pays less and less to buy and flip a home these days.

From April through June, the typical home flipped by an investor resulted in a 25.1% return on investment, before expenses. That’s the lowest profit margin for such transactions since 2008, according to an analysis by Attom, a real estate data company.

Gross profits — the difference between what an investor paid for a property and what it sold for — fell 13.6% in the second quarter from a year earlier to $65,300, the firm said. Attom’s analysis defines a flipped home as a property that sells within 12 months of the last time it sold.

Home flippers buy a home, typically with cash, then pay for any repairs or upgrades needed to spruce up the property before putting it back on the market.

The shrinking profitability for home flipping is largely due to home prices, which continue to climb nationally, albeit at a slower pace, driving up acquisition costs for investors.

“We’re seeing very low profit margins from home flipping because of the historically high cost of homes,” said Rob Barber, Attom’s CEO. “The initial buy-in for properties that are ideal for flipping, often lower priced homes that may need some work, keeps going up.”

The median price of a home flipped in the second quarter was bought by an investor for $259,700, a record high according to data going back to 2000, according to Attom.

The median sales price of flipped homes was $325,000, unchanged from the first quarter, the firm said.

A chronic shortage of homes on the market and heightened competition for lower-priced properties are also helping drive up investors’ acquisition costs.

Home flipping profits have declined for more than a decade as home prices rose along with the housing market’s recovery from the housing crash in the late 2000s.

Consider, in the fall of 2012, the typical flipped home netted a 62.9% return on investment before expenses, Attom said.

Even as home flipping has become less profitable, such transactions remain widespread.

Some 78,621 single-family homes and condos were flipped in the April-June quarter, accounting for 7.4% of all home sales during the quarter — a slight decline from both the first quarter and the second quarter of 2024, according to Attom.

The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump since early 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. Sales have remained sluggish this year as mortgage rates, until recently, remained elevated.

As home sales have slowed, properties are taking longer to sell. That’s led to a sharply higher inventory of homes on the market, benefiting investors and other home shoppers who can afford to bypass current mortgage rates by paying in cash or tapping home equity gains.

With many aspiring homeowners priced out of the market, real estate investors — whether those looking to buy and rent or home flippers — are taking up a bigger share of U.S. home sales overall.

Some 33% of all homes sold in the second quarter were bought by investors -- the highest share in at least five years, according to a report by real estate data provider BatchData.

Between 2020 and 2023, the share of homes bought by investors averaged 18.5%.

All told, investors bought 345,752 homes in the April-June quarter, an increase of 15% from the first quarter, but a 12% decline from the same period last year, the firm said.

Even so, investor-owned homes account for roughly 20% of the nation’s 86 million single-family homes, the firm said.

Federal health officials are warning consumers not to eat certain heat-and-eat beef meatball pasta meals sold at Walmart stores because they may be contaminated with listeria bacteria previously linked to a deadly outbreak.

The U.S. Agriculture Department issued a public health alert late Thursday for Marketside Linguine with Beef Meatballs & Marinara Sauce sold in refrigerated 12-ounce clear plastic trays. The products have best-by dates of Sept. 22 through Oct. 1 and may still be in consumer’s refrigerators.

The affected meals contain the establishment numbers “EST. 50784” and “EST. 47718” inside the USDA mark of inspection on the label. They were sent to Walmart stores nationwide.

No recall has been issued, but FreshRealm, a large food producer that distributed the products, said they advised Walmart this week to pull the meals from store shelves. Additional products may be identified, according to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The meals may be contaminated with the same strain of listeria that caused an outbreak tied to chicken fettuccine Alfredo sold at Walmart and Kroger stores. Three people were killed and at least 17 were sickened in that outbreak, which led to a large recall this summer.

FreshRealm conducted tests that detected the listeria in linguine used in the meatball dish, company officials said. The strain matched the listeria identified in the chicken fettuccine Alfredo outbreak, the company said.

“We have long maintained that the source of the listeria was likely an ingredient supplied by a third party,” the company said in a statement.

The pasta came from Nate’s Fine Foods of Roseville, California. The company did not immediately respond to questions.

Listeria infections can cause serious illness, particularly in older adults, people with weakened immune systems and those who are pregnant or their newborns. Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions.

About 1,600 people get sick each year from listeria infections and about 260 die, the CDC says. Federal officials in December said they were revamping protocols to prevent listeria infections after several high-profile outbreaks, including one linked to Boar’s Head deli meats that led to 10 deaths and more than 60 illnesses last year.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Shares of some big drugmakers advanced above broader indexes Friday as Wall Street started sorting out President Donald Trump’s latest tariff announcement.

The president said late Thursday that he would place 100% import taxes on branded or patented pharmaceuticals starting Oct. 1, but those tariffs would not apply to companies building U.S. manufacturing plants. He defined that as either “breaking ground” or being “under construction.”

Several big drugmakers like Merck & Co. Inc., Eli Lilly and Co. and Johnson & Johnson have announced U.S. expansion plans.

Trump has talked about pharmaceutical tariffs for months, but he has said he would delay them for a year or a year and a half to give companies time to stockpile medicines here and shift manufacturing.

Analysts have said companies started stockpiling medicines in the U.S. earlier this year.

Jefferies analyst Akash Tewari said in a research note that Thursday’s announcement shouldn’t have a material impact on the big drugmakers, given their construction plans.

Brand-name drug companies also have fat profit margins that can provide some flexibility to make investments and absorb tariff costs. Manufacturers of cheaper generic drugs, which were not mentioned in Thursday’s announcement, do not. Generics account for most U.S. prescriptions.

David Risinger of Leerink Partners said smaller drugmakers may be vulnerable to the new taxes, although he noted that it was hard to predict which ones.

He said several questions remain unanswered after Thursday’s announcement. Those include whether the action will survive legal challenges and how the phrases “breaking ground” and “under construction” are defined for tariff enforcement.

Risinger also questioned whether the new taxes might be a negotiating tactic tied to an investigation the administration launched in the spring over how importing drugs and their ingredients affects national security.

Shares of Merck, Lilly and J&J all rose less than 1% in midday trading Friday, slightly higher than the S&P 500 index.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of a House committee that pushed for the law demanding TikTok be spun off from its Chinese owners has requested an urgent briefing from the White House, one day after Trump signed an executive order supporting a proposed deal that would put the popular social video platform under U.S. ownership.

In a statement released Friday, Rep. John Moolenaar, the chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, praised the proposed deal as “an important step” in transitioning ownership of the TikTok platform to American hands but he emphasized that “divestment was not the law’s only requirement.”

“The law also set firm guardrails that prohibit cooperation between ByteDance and any prospective TikTok successor on the all-important recommendation algorithm, as well as preclude operational ties between the new entity and ByteDance,” Moolenaar said.

The Michigan Republican’s statement marks the first congressional effort to conduct oversight into the negotiations over TikTok, coming nearly two weeks after Chinese and American officials met in Spain to discuss a framework divestment deal for TikTok. Trump on Thursday signed an executive order providing support for the deal, and said Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to move forward with negotiations.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from the Associated Press regarding the urgent briefing.

Much is still unknown about the actual deal in the works, but the new U.S. venture would license the famed ByteDance-owned algorithm that currently keeps TikTok users engaged. U.S. tech giant Oracle, a confirmed partner in the U.S. investment consortium that would own TikTok, would audit the copy of the algorithm and monitor it for security purposes.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday assured the public that the deal would not only keep TikTok operating but also protect Americans’ data privacy as required by law. Moolenaar on Friday said he would like to know more.

While algorithms are valuable assets, the real value of TikTok is its users, which is likely why the consortium won’t just start from scratch to build a new app, said computer scientist Bart Knijnenburg, an associate professor at Clemson University who has studied how recommendation systems steer people to online content.

Knijnenburg said all algorithms are biased in some way and if the administration is serious about retraining the TikTok algorithm to avoid Chinese influence, it should push for “radical openness” in TikTok’s mechanics so that users have a window into how bias might be influencing their feeds.

More than politics, Knijnenburg said the biggest problem with TikTok’s algorithm is that it’s geared toward addictive engagement and overuse.

“Moving it to the U.S. is not going to magically solve these types of problems,” he said. “Any company might put undue influence on these applications and from a business perspective, the best way to engage users is to make them addicted to watching these videos, which is not a good idea.”

Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, doubts that the deal, as revealed so far, complies with the law.

“The law is clear: divestiture means severance, not supervision,” Singleton said. “A board seat for ByteDance or any continued role in maintaining the algorithm would flout Congress’s mandate.”

Though the details have yet to be finalized, the U.S. investment group’s controlling stake in the new venture would be around 80%. While ByteDance is expected to have a stake in the new venture, it would be less than 20% — a portion of the ownership reserved for foreign investors. The board running the new platform would be controlled by U.S. investors. ByteDance will be represented by one person on the board, but that individual will be excluded from any security-related matters.

Singleton argues that a board foothold by ByteDance is not merely symbolic. “ByteDance’s reported role as the largest single shareholder in a restructured TikTok U.S. venture, combined with a board seat, ensures continuing Chinese influence over the app,” he said. “Plainly put, ByteDance on the board means Beijing in the building.”

Vance said he expects the new U.S.-based TikTok to be valued at about $14 billion, describing it as a “good deal” for investors who must ultimately decide “what they want to invest in and what they think is the proper value.”

That’s a “surprisingly low” valuation, said Daniel Keum, a management professor at Columbia University’s business school.

Keum said it’s possible that “politics overrode the business case” or that the licensing structure, which hasn’t yet been disclosed, could have been designed with high fees or profit-sharing that depressed the value of TikTok’s app in the U.S.

Keum said TikTok had an early edge in attracting youth to its innovative video-sharing format, but its competitiveness has “fundamentally eroded” as social media creators and influencers increasingly post their videos on many different apps.

As TikTok’s popularity soared among young Americans in the past several years, U.S. lawmakers grew concerned that Beijing — viewed by many on the Capitol Hill as the biggest geopolitical rival to the U.S. — could use the platform to influence public discourse in the United States or spy on its users.

“ByteDance has shown time and again that it is a bad actor, and the Chinese Communist Party’s ultimate goal is to see America divided and weakened,” Moolenaar said in his statement. “That is why, on an overwhelming bipartisan basis, Congress required ByteDance to divest control of TikTok.”

President Joe Biden signed legislation passed by Congress last year that would ban TikTok unless ByteDance sold its U.S. assets to an American company by early this year. The U.S. Supreme Court in January unanimously upheld the TikTok law.

Trump, after he returned to the White House, has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the U.S. as his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.

On Friday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry didn’t provide any new information but repeated China’s position on TikTok.

“The Chinese government respects the will of enterprises and welcomes them to conduct sound commercial negotiations based on market rules, reaching solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and achieve a balanced outcome of interests,” said Guo Jiakun, a ministry spokesperson. “We hope the U.S. will provide an open, fair, and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese enterprises investing in the United States.”

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AP Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report

NEW YORK (AP) — Word nerd alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thursday it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds over 5,000 new words, including “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone” and “ghost kitchen.”

The 12th edition of “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” comes 22 years after the book’s last hard-copy update and amid declining U.S. sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with preorders now available.

Petrichor, by the way, is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the speed of a computer. Dumbphones are just that, mobile devices we used before the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandemic, are commercial spaces for hire.

Other additions: “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “rizz,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “adulting” and “cancel culture.” There’s also “beast mode,” “dashcam,” “doomscroll,”“WFH” and “side-eye.”

The new “Collegiate” also includes enhanced entries for some top lookups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster.com.

The company removed two sections of the “Collegiate’s” 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new content. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, exclusively told The Associated Press ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they reach for the internet.

(It’s a city in southwest Michigan, for the eternally curious, and he’s a Russian composer who died in 1908.)

Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including “enwheel,” meaning encircle.

“We wanted to make the ‘Collegiate’ more useful, a better design, more interesting,” Barlow said. “We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book.”

The chunky, linen-cover “Collegiate” update weighs in at nearly 5 pounds. It comes as adult reference book sales, including dictionaries and atlases, have shown annual declines since 2022, according to Circana BookScan, which captures 85% of the print market. In the 12-month period ending Sept., 6, dictionary sales fell 9% compared with the same period prior.

Merriam-Webster, the country’s leading dictionary company, sells about 1.5 million of them a year. Most are regularly revised but not fully overhauled like the “Collegiate,” Barlow said. The company’s retail sales overall have generally held steady in the last few years, he said. Print sales account for a small fraction of the company’s revenue.

“While the print dictionary is not at all important to the growth and profitability of this wonderful language company, it’s still our heart,” Barlow said. “There are people out there who just love books, and we love books.”

For dictionary sales overall, there’s a bit of sunshine at Barnes & Noble. The chain’s dictionary sales have gone up so far this year over the same period in 2024, said Kat Sarfas, marketing manager for nonfiction. She noted similar increases for such reference materials as the U.S. Constitution as well.

“I do think there is that nostalgia that people have to be able to pull a dictionary off the shelf and look up a word,” Sarfas said. “There’s a certain desire to have these kinds of reference materials at home. It may be something that people feel like, as educated people, we should own.”

While Merriam-Webster’s “Collegiate,” originally focused on the needs of college students, is among top sellers in dictionaries for Barnes & Noble, its general-interest “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary” is more popular. It was last tweaked in 2022. A pocket version is also a strong seller, Sarfas said.

Death knells for print dictionaries have been ringing since the rise of the internet, said Grant Barrett, a lexicographer, former dictionary editor for Oxford University Press and others, and co-host of public radio’s “A Way with Words.”

“Now we’re in this weird limbo where people want the dictionary but they don’t want to pay for it, because they’re used to getting things for free on the internet,” he said.

Merriam-Webster’s website receives about a billion visits a year, making the company a word digital leader as well, Barlow said. Over the last 10 years, revenue overall has grown by nearly 500% on the strength of its online dictionary, thesaurus, mobile apps and word games.

The new “Collegiate” introduces curated word lists, such as words from the 1990s and “10 Words for Things that Often Go Unnamed.” And it has more word histories. Did you know “calculate” comes from the Latin for “pebble,” because ancient Romans used little stones to do addition and subtraction?

And, for incredibly granular dictionary fans, the new “Collegiate” preserves lettered thumb notches — those little finger-size dents along the edges of reference book pages — to make browsing easier. The only printer doing the notches in the U.S. has closed since Merriam-Webster was last in need, so it had to go to India, Barlow said.

Print versions still matter in preserving cultures, as gifts, as a household utility, and for students under cellphone bans at school, among other reasons, said Sarfas, Barrett and other book pros.

“There are lots of communities that speak languages that have never been documented, and they may not have been documented because those languages might have been actively suppressed. I’m thinking about Indigenous communities across North America,” said Lindsay Rose Russell, executive director of the Dictionary Society of North America.

“Having a print dictionary has all along sort of indicated the legitimacy of a language,” said Russell, also an author who teaches English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barrett said his show and its companion podcast receive a lot of letters from readers that lend insight into how they use dictionaries.

“Some people use the dictionary almost as a meditative resource where they just open it up and see what they find and kind of let their minds wander a little bit,” he said.

Got a band in need of a name? Commodores’ trumpet player William King used a dictionary to find his, running his finger down a page, Russell noted.

“We lucked out,” King told People magazine in 1978. “We almost became ‘The Commodes.’ ”