All-Cash Buyers Still Dominate As The Market Slows
Summary
Essentially, affluent buyers have been taking up greater market share largely because interest rates doubled from a year ago, reaching 6% in mid-September. Buyers who don’t use loans are able to avoid high interest payments that exacerbate home prices, which have remained elevated even though the market is beginning to slow. Remote work also gave more Americans the option to do all-cash purchases, since it allowed a record share of homebuyers to relocate from expensive to more affordable parts of the country. Florida has three of the five metro areas with the highest share of all-cash purchases, partly because the state is home to a lot of affluent buyers. The story is completely different now, as low down payments are no longer an automatic deal breaker for sellers.” FHA loans have been losing popularity since the start of the pandemic; in 2019, 17% of mortgaged purchases used them.