Despite months of shrinking activity from all-cash buyers, Miami-Dade County had the most cash sales of any other region in the country during September.
Among all the county’s home purchases that month, 50.8 percent were completed without financing, according to a new report from analytics firm CoreLogic.
That makes Miami-Dade the most cash heavy market in all the United States — for September, at least. Close behind was Palm Beach County with a 50.6 percent ratio of cash sales, Philadelphia with 48.9 percent and Broward County with 47.9 percent.
For the past several months, cash sales in Miami-Dade have been steadily falling. That could be chalked up to a strengthening housing market flushing out distressed and foreclosed properties, which are most commonly bought in cash.
During September, 58.3 percent of lender-owned properties in Miami-Dade were bought in cash — but those properties only made up 6.4 percent of the county’s home sales.
Resales have the biggest impact on the county’s share of cash sales, as they represented 81 percent of all home sales during September. About 32 percent of those sales were done without financing.
As a whole, Florida still ranks highly for cash sales compared to the rest of the country. The state saw 45 percent of its home sales made in cash in September, falling behind only West Virginia with 46 percent and Alabama with 48 percent.
Nationwide, nearly 36 percent of all home sales in September were completed without financing. That figure has fallen 3.4 percentage points since September of 2014, and it has continued decreasing since the nation’s peak of 46.6 percent during the depths of the housing crisis in January 2011. — Sean Stewart-Muniz