Home Cash Sales Decline

Cash sales accounted for 27.2 percent of all home sales in the Inland Empire during December.

That represented a year-over-year drop of nearly one percent and was well below the national rate of 33.4 percent for the last month of 2015, Irvine-based CoreLogic reported Friday.

Nationwide, cash sales last year were 33.9 percent, the lowest recorded in any year since 2008. Cash sales reached their peak in January 2011, when they accounted for 46.6 percent of all home sales in the United States, according to CoreLogic.

Before the recession and housing crisis, cash sales accounted for about 25 percent of all home sales in the United States. If the present trend continues, cash sales nationwide could return to that level by the middle of next year, CoreLogic stated.

Cash sales are important because they’re a sign of how active investment buyers – someone who buys a home to sell it rather than live in it – are in the market. Some economists have charged investment buyers with helping to cause the recession by driving up housing prices to unrealistic levels in 2007 and 2008.