IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
Cash sales of single-family homes in the Inland Empire dropped slightly during March, according to data released Thursday.
The number of cash transactions during the third month of the year in Riverside and San Bernardino counties was 25.3 percent, a 1.6 percent decrease year-over-year, Irvine-based CoreLogic reported in its monthly cash sales report.
Cash sales are considered significant because they show how many investment buyers are active at a given time. Investment buyers buy a home to sell it for a profit, not live in it, and economists and housing analysts often accuse them of driving up prices artificially.
Nationwide, cash sales accounted for 33 percent of all home sales in March, a drop of 2.4 percent compared with March 2015. At the current rate of decline, cash sales should be down to 25 percent – the approximate rate before the housing crisis hit – by the middle of 2018, CoreLogic predicted.
