CASH BUYERS

It’s been written that investors and others are purchasing real estate with cash. I’ve written in another post that during the ’80s recession what saved our market were land sales contracts, assumptions and lots of cash transactions.  I thought it would be interesting to check on our local market this go ’round and see what methods of financing were taking place and how our real estate market fared with all those cash buyers.

It actually surprised me as I thought FHA actually would be the major player due to all the first-time home buyers wanting the tax credit and out purchasing; when good old conventional loans were the norm.  My chart below shows financing for the month of July 2009 as our August data isn’t available from RMLS™ as yet.

July 2009 Methods of Financing. Copyright Betty Jung 2009

The condos, townhouses, and attached info at top and data for residential single family is at the bottom.  Unfortunately, Lake Oswego and West Linn share the same data so there’s no breakdown without doing an exhaustive search.

Cash was king it seems in West Portland for condos; whereas, there were still more conventional buyers than cash throughout the westside of metro Portland. 

Source: Data from RMLS™

Altos Research just published their monthly report for August on the housing market in major markets throughout the U.S. 

“For the month of August, housing inventory declined in 22 of 26 markets and was up in 4 markets. Inventory declined by 2.6% across the 10 markets composing the Altos Composite index. Inventory grew by the largest amount in San Diego up 1.6%. Inventory fell by the largest amounts in San Jose and San Francisco with drops of 6.4% and 5.1% respectively.

“With inventory flat or down in most major markets, we expect asking prices to exhibit typical seasonal weakness but not another big step down,” said Michael Simonsen co-founder and chief executive officer of Altos Research. “A sudden increase in mortgage rates along with the November expiration of the federal government’s $8,000 first-time homebuyer credit could change that if demand drops sharply and inventory grows too quickly.”

During August all markets except San Francisco had a median days-on-market of 100 or more. By far, the market with the slowest rate of inventory turnover was again Miami, now at a median of 251 days-on-market or more than eight months. San Francisco experienced the fastest rate of inventory turnover with a median days-on-market of 90.”

Our local stats for August from RMLS™ won’t be available until around ther 15th and I’ll be reporting on those at that time..

© Copyright 2008-2009 Betty Jung. All Rights Reserved. Use of this article, photos and images without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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