The share of buyers who paid all cash for their homes continued to decrease in September.
According to a post on CoreLogic’s “Insights” blog, all-cash sales accounted for 32.5% of total home sales in September – a decrease of 0.2 percentage points compared with August and a decrease of 3.4 percentage points compared with 35.9% in September 2014.
All-cash sales peaked in January 2011, when they accounted for 46.6% of transactions, according to the post by CoreLogic’s Molly Boesel. Prior to the housing crisis, they were about 25% of all sales.
At the current pace of reduction, cash sales could reach 25% again by mid-2017, Boesel writes.
About 58.3% of all-cash sales in September were for real estate owned (REO) properties.
Resales had the next highest cash sales share at 32%, followed by short sales at 29.1% and newly constructed homes at 15.9%.
Although a high percentage of REO sales are still all cash, Boesel points out that the number of REO sales has decreased significantly; they accounted for only 6.4% of all sales in September.
In January 2011, when the all-cash sales hit their peak, REO sales represented 23.9% of total home sales.
States that had the highest shares of all-cash sales in September included Alabama (48.2%), West Virginia (46.0%), Florida (45.2%), New York (44.1%) and Kentucky (39.6%).
Metropolitan areas that had the highest shares of all-cash sales included Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla. (50.8%); West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach, Fla. (50.6%); Philadelphia (48.9%); Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Deerfield Beach, Fla. (47.9%); and North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla. (47.2%).
Syracuse, N.Y., had the lowest cash sales share at 14.1%.