PROVIDENCE – Cash purchases of homes in the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area continued to fall in March, reaching 23.6 percent of all sales, a 9.2 percentage point decrease from a year earlier. The metro percentage is significantly lower than the national average, which reached 33 percent in March.
Through the first three months of the year, cash sales across the United States accounted for 34.7 percent of all sales, the lowest percentage, said CoreLogic, for the start of any year since 2008. The highest percentage of homes purchased for cash were those that were real estate-owned, 57.2 percent in March. Resales were purchased for cash 32.9 percent of the time, while short sales were purchased by cash 30.6 percent of the time, and new homes were bought by cash 14.4 percent of the time.
Prior to the housing crises and Great Recession, cash sales accounted for about 25 percent of all home sales. At the current rate of decline, the national average of cash home sales will reach 25 percent in mid-2018, said CoreLogic.
REO home sales, while purchased more than half the time for cash, also account for 6.8 percent of all sales, the smallest percentage of the four types of homes reported on. At the January 2011 peak for cash sales, REO homes accounted for 23.9 percent of all homes in the U.S. Sales of existing homes represented about four-fifths of all homes sold in March 2016.
The states with the highest percentage of cash sales were:
- Alabama – 49.8 percent
- New York – 47.5 percent
- Florida – 45.9 percent
- Michigan – 41.8 percent
- Indiana – 41 percent
Of major metro areas, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of cash sales, at 55.7 percent, while Syracuse, N.Y., has the lowest cash sales portion, at 11.7 percent.
