Home Cash Sales down Locally, Nationally

Home Cash Sales down Locally, Nationally

Cash sales of single-family homes in the Inland Empire dropped in September.

Houses purchased with cash accounted for 23.7 percent of all single-family home sales in Riverside and San Bernardino counties during that month, down 2.9 percent year-over-year, according to data released by CoreLogic in Irvine.

That was below the national rate in September, which was 32.5 percent, a year-over-year decrease of 3.4 percent, DataQuick reported.

Cash sales are considered important, and housing analysts watch them carefully, because they’re considered an indication of how many speculative buyers are operating in a market. Speculative buyers are often accused of artificially driving up housing prices, and some economists have accused them of helping to cause the Great Recession.

National cash sales peaked in January 2011 when they reached 46.6 percent of all housing transactions. Before the housing crisis cash sales accounted for about 25 percent of all U.S. home sales, and they should return to that level by the middle of 2017 if the present decline continues, according to CoreLogic.