If you are thinking about selling your home in the North Port - Port Charlotte - Punta Gorda - or Englewood area, you may ask yourself these questions:
Who will be buying our home?
How will they pay?
Will my home have to pass an appraisal?
I wanted to blog today about the national averages...and then about what I have personally seen in the last couple months.
Nationally: A recent analysis was done by a Real Estate Data company called RealtyTrac, it ranked the areas that had the most cash buyers. Florida was ranked #1! That means we have more people paying cash for homes, than any other state in the country.
The specific numbers are this:
% of cash sales: 65.8%
Median List Price: $159,900
Let me put this in perspective: 2 out of every 3 buyers in Florida, is paying cash for the home! That is a huge number. The article went on to say that about 15% is an institutional buyer (investor, bank, etc). So that tells me about half of the sales are real people, paying cash.
What have I seen? I have personally closed a little over a dozen transactions in the last couple months, of those: 50% were cash deals. Who are the people that are paying with cash? For me, in the last couple months it has been a wide variety of people: everyone from people taking a loan from family memebers, to working families that are using their savings, investors, and another who took a 401k loan.
What does this mean to you?
It depends if you are buying, or selling.
If you are buying, you just need to be aware of the market...and the strength of offers that you are competing against. If you find out there are multiple offers on the property of your dreams, and you are doing a financed transaction...you may want to come in at your best offer.
If you are selling, there may be less hoops to jump through. There will not be a finance contingency and typically a cash deal will not have appraisal contigency as well. If you have a "unique" property, without a lot of comparable properties on the market needed to justufy the price to a bank....this is good news.
Another thing to think about is if the home you need to sell is in poor condition, and will not pass an inspection (which many loans require like FHA/VA/USDA). In this case you need a cash buyer or you will not be able to sell. There are many reasons for poor condition, the biggest reason is because the property is in a short sale situation. The next biggest is usually liquidating an estate. So if you have been worried about selling your short sale home because of its condition, you may want to rethink if that may be an option for you to avoid a foreclosure on your credit.