Is Cash King? The Low-Down on Cash Homes Sales in the Waco Area

Soooo, I came across an article that was written about cash home sales in different parts of the country and quickly realized that I have NEVER ran similar numbers for our own area! So I did – I can’t believe it took me this long to really dive into the “cash” arena of local home sales.

Hopefully some of these statistics, you’ll find interesting and worth remembering. These numbers are based on home sales data for the previous 12 months and between May 14, 2013 – May 14, 2014. All of these numbers reflect only cash sales (not overall sales) and only sales considered “residential” (no farm and ranches, multi-family homes, commercial, etc…). Okay, I’ll shut up now, onto the low-down on the cash segment of the Waco housing market:

22.23% of all sales were in cash

The average asking price: $126,748. The average sold price: $117,748.
I find this interesting. For the Waco area, the average sold price to asking price ratio is about 96%. Meaning, on average, homes sell for 96% of asking price – except in cash sales. The average sales price for a cash deal comes out to 92.9% of asking price! It appears that cash buyers, on average, are getting the home for lower than non cash buyers

Percentage of cash sales (and average price) by school district:
China Spring: 4.48% – average sold price: $180,277
Connally: 3.7% – average sold price: $131,927
Lorena: 2.34% – average sold price: $208,165
Midway: 16.18% – average sold price: $206,091
Robinson: 2.92% – average sold price: $135,434
Waco: 44.05% – average sold price: $87,476

The highest price paid in the last year in a residential cash deal: $1,487,000. There was a farm and ranch sale of $2,000,000 paid in cash too

1.36% were one bedroom homes. 24.37% were two bedroom homes. 52.83% were three bedroom homes. 19.49% were four bedroom homes

The average age of the home was 43 years

4.68% of the homes were less than 5 years old

So, who are these people buying in all cash? Well, that’s another question, but out of the cash transactions that I’ve been involvled with, the buyers have been typically retired (or close to retirement) and spent their lifetime saving money. Also, in a lot of cases, they recently sold a property (sometimes a home a they’ve been in for decades) and they’ve had a good amount of equity in the house that they sold (between the paying down the balance and the home’s value increasing over the years), so they used the cash from that sale to purchase the new home. Also, most of those buyers were down-sizing as well. You know, they kids off to college, it’s just the 2 of them now.

Those are the numbers in a nutshell. If there’s a particular statistic you would like for me to look at it, just give me a call and I’ll be happy to run a few numbers for you!