Cash sales share unchanged in Prov. metro, higher in R.I. in December

CORELOGIC SAID the cash sales share of total home sales in the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area was unchanged year over year in December at 22.6 percent. / COURTESY CORELOGIC
CORELOGIC SAID the cash sales share of total home sales in the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area was unchanged year over year in December at 22.6 percent. / COURTESY CORELOGIC

PROVIDENCE – The cash sales share of total home sales in the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area was unchanged year over year in December at 22.6 percent.

Rhode Island’s cash sales share rose to 26 percent in December, a 1.4 percentage point increase from December 2015.
Cash sales shares in the Providence metro and Rhode Island both were lower than the national cash sales share of total home sales that month at 33.1 percent, CoreLogic said Wednesday.

The full-year national cash sales share of total home sales at 32.1 percent was the lowest since 2007, when it was 27 percent, the real estate data tracker said. The national full-year figure also was 2.2 percentage points below the full-year 2015 share.

The national cash sales share peaked in January 2011, when cash transactions accounted for 46.6 percent of total home sales nationally. Before the housing crisis, the cash sales share of total home sales averaged approximately 25 percent. If the cash sales share continues to fall at the same rate it did in December 2016, the share should hit 25 percent by mid-2019, CoreLogic said.

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New York had the largest cash sales share in the nation at 47.9 percent in December.

Washington, D.C., had the lowest cash sales share in December at 16.8 percent.

Nationally, cash sales represented 61.1 percent of real-estate owned sales in December, followed by short sales with a cash sales share of 34.2 percent, resales at 33 percent and newly constructed homes at 16.7 percent. REO transactions have declined since peaking in January 2011, CoreLogic said.

The national distressed sales share of total home sales, of which REO sales comprise 5.8 percent and short sales made up 2 percent, was 7.8 percent in December. That was the lowest distressed sales share for any month since October 2007.

At its peak in January 2009, distressed sales totaled 32.4 percent of all sales, with REO sales representing 27.9 percentage points of that share. The pre-crisis share of distressed sales was traditionally about 2 percent. If the current trends continue, it will reach that 2 percent mark by mid-next year.

All but nine states recorded lower distressed sales shares in December compared with a year ago.

Maryland had the largest share of distressed sales of any state at 17.9 percent in December, followed by Connecticut at 17.6 percent and Michigan at 15.8 percent. North Dakota had the smallest distressed sales share at 1.3 percent. Only North Dakota, Utah and the District of Columbia are close to their pre-crisis levels – each are within 1 percentage point.

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