IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
Cash transactions accounted for 25.1 percent of all home sales in the Inland Empire during November, according to data released Wednesday.
That was virtually unchanged from April 2015 – a drop of 0.4 percent – but it was below the national rate of 31.6 percent, Irvine-based CoreLogic reported.
During the first four months of this year, cash sales made up 33.9 percent of all home sales nationwide, the lowest start to any year since 2008.
Cash sales nationwide peaked in January 2011, when 46.6 percent of the homes sold in the United States were cash transactions.
Before the recession hit in 2008, cash sales made up about 25 percent of the market. If cash sales continue to decline at the pace they declined in April, they should return to 25 percent nationwide by the middle of 2018, CoreLogic predicted.
Cash transactions are considered an accurate gauge of how many speculative buyers – people who buy a house to sell it rather than live in it – there are in a market. Speculative buyers are often accused of driving up home prices artificially.
