http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cash-home-sales-reach-high-174855788.html
All-cash purchases accounted for 42% of all sales of residential property in November 2013, up from 39% during the previous month, according to data from real-estate data firm RealtyTrac released Friday. “This is still a very cash- and investor-driven market,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.
The cities with the biggest month-over-month jumps in the number of all-cash sales, according to RealtyTrac, included Florida (63%), Georgia and Nevada (both 51%), South Carolina (50%) and Michigan (49%). This helped boost overall sales of U.S. residential properties, which sold at an annualized pace of 5.1 million in November 2013, a 1% increase from the previous month and a rise of 10% from a year ago.
When interest rates went up slightly in June, there was a notable increase in cash sales, Daren Blomquist says. “Some markets are more interest-rate sensitive than others based on affordability,” he says. “Just a slight increase makes homes a lot less affordable.” In fact, another report by Goldman Sachs in August was even more strongly in the cash-is-king camp, estimating that cash sales now account for 57% of all residential home sales versus 19% in 2005. Walt Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, says that the association’s estimate of the share of the market made up by all-cash buyers is lower than others’, at 31% in July, but that it’s still at an all-time high.
Molony says that investors make up 32% of all-cash buyers (70% of all investors pay cash), up from 31% in October and 30% in November 2012, while retirees who’ve built up equity in their homes or paid off their mortgages account for around 12%. The rest include vacation-home buyers and foreign buyers.
While cash buys help explain the surge in home sales over the past year, some experts say it’s an unsustainable trend — and one that should be greeted with caution. Although RealtyTrac doesn’t identify who has cash-in-hand, experts say wealthy Americans and downsizing retirees account for some of these all-cash deals. Investors who are keen to make a profit by buying low and renting those properties — or flipping them — also drive up the number of all-cash deals, he says. None of these three groups — flippers, retirees and the wealthy — are big enough to sustain the market in the long run, he says. If it remains dominant in the long run, cash buying “will have a chilling effect on home sales and prices,” Blomquist says.
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