Why So Many Homes Today Are Being Sold to Cash Buyers

The percentage of homebuyers who purchased with cash dropped last year, but is still well above pre-pandemic norms.

Just under one-third (32.6%) of homes sold in the U.S. last year were bought in cash, according to an analysis by Redfin. While this is lower than the roughly 35% of cash home sales that took place in 2023 and on par with the percentage of cash sales in 2022, it’s considerably above the approximately 26% recorded at the beginning of 2020.

A considerable body of research finds that would-be homebuyers who have to borrow money are at a disadvantage — even when rates are more attractive than they are today. Many sellers prefer the certainty of a buyer who comes with cash in hand, rather than accepting an offer contingent on the buyer’s ability to secure mortgage financing.

Although frustrated home shoppers across the country have found themselves outbid by cash buyers due to a combination of constrained supply and booming demand, researchers have found that sellers are willing to accept less for their homes if a buyer offers cash. A 2021 study from the University of California San Diego found that cash buyers pay between 6% and 17% less, depending on the strength of the local current housing market and the buyer’s credit profile.

The bad news for buyers today, especially first-time homebuyers, is that the historically high share of cash buyers is likely to persist through 2025, according to Redfin economic research lead Chen Zhao.

“It really feels right now like the 2025 housing market will look a lot like the 2024 housing market,” she predicts. “It feels like overall housing transactions will stay very close to the same volume. Because of that, the all-cash share would probably stay pretty similar.”

Zhao says the increase in cash sales between 2020 and 2023 was driven by a combination of factors. Initially, investors piled into a hot housing market, seeking homes to rent or flip, while the post-pandemic housing migration gave homeowners moving from high- to lower-cost housing markets the buying power to purchase their new homes with cash.

When the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022 to try to rein in runaway inflation, the fallout hit ordinary families — already struggling with home affordability as prices notched record after record — faster and harder than investors. “The main thing that drives the share of homes that are purchased with all cash is mortgage rates,” Zhao says.

While higher borrowing costs also have dampened investors’ appetite over the past couple of years, she says, the plunge in homebuying activity overall has been so sharp that it has led to cash sales comprising a greater share proportionately.

When the Fed began a rapid series of rate hikes, bringing its benchmark fed funds rate from near zero to an effective rate of 5.33% over the course of 16 months, economists, executives and ordinary Americans braced for a recession.

To the surprise of many, that didn’t happen. “The Fed's rate hikes have not put us into a recession, and that’s highly unusual,” Zhao says. “A lot of it is because the economy is less interest rate-sensitive than it was in the past,” she adds, in part because so many homeowners took advantage of the plunge in mortgage rates in 2020 to buy or refinance homes, contributing to the “lock-in effect” that has acted as a brake on housing market activity.

“The lock-in effect is fading, but it's fading at a slow pace,” Zhao says.

On the flip side, inflation has been higher for longer than many predicted: A look at Fed officials’ evolving views in the projections the central bank publishes four times a year shows that the persistence of inflation caught even the experts by surprise. With this scenario in place, economists now take an increasingly dim view of any rate cuts this calendar year. Unfortunately for would-be homebuyers, this means cash buyers are likely to have outsized influence on the housing market for the foreseeable future.

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