More people in Raleigh and North Carolina are buying homes using cold, hard cash, according to the latest report by Corelogic. Cash sales for homes sold in June in the Raleigh housing market were at 35.9 percent of the total, up from a rate of 32.2 percent a year ago. Statewide, cash sales in North Carolina were an average 34 percent in June compared to a 32 percent cash sales percentage the year before. 
Cash sales for homes in Raleigh and in North Carolina were up in June 2016, bucking the national trend that hit a new low in June. Interesting enough, that’s the opposite trend of what’s happening in much of the rest of the U.S. after records of home cash sales in hit a record low in June. Nationally, about 29.3 percent of total home sales were tallied as cash sales – down 2.5 percentage points from the year prior.
“These numbers are amazing to me,” says Scott Hoyt, managing director at ChangingStreets.com, a Raleigh-based real estate company, and a former mortgage banker. “My agent experience and hunch – not data backed – is that there are two factors at work.” Hoyt says one factor that could be boosting the number of cash sales in Raleigh is that many of the transplants moving into the region are relocating from other areas with very high housing costs. “People can come here and purchase a similar home for the equity they had in Brooklyn, Boston or San Jose essentially ‘down costing’ as opposed to ‘down sizing’,” he says. A second possible factor is increased interest level from real estate investors seeking properties in the Triangle for quick flips or to convert into rental properties. In those instances, investors are not seeking a traditional mortgage loan. “This would be very prevalent on the lower end of the price range,” Hoyt says.
Nationally in June, New York had the largest cash sales share of any state at 45.3 percent, followed by Alabama at 44.6 percent, Florida at 40.6 percent, Oklahoma at 38.6 percent and Indiana at 35.7 percent.
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