Miami-Dade cash sales down for December: report

The king has been dethroned.

Cash sales for Miami-Dade County, once the nation’s largest hotspot for no-financing deals, continued to fall in December.

Of all the county’s home sales in December, 53.2 percent were made without financing. That’s a 5.4 percentage point drop year-over-year, according to the report from real estate research group CoreLogic.

Though Miami-Dade has regularly been the nation’s biggest haven for cash deals, Detroit took that title in December with 62.7 percent of its deals done without financing. Even Palm Beach County ranked higher than Miami, landing in second place with a 53.4 percent share.

Part of the reason Miami-Dade’s cash sales are falling is the county’s shrinking supply of distressed properties.

In December, 59.2 percent of lender-owned home sales were made with cash. Those properties have been steadily pushed out of the market as home values and homeowner equity strengthens. Resales, which made up 79 percent of all housing transactions in December, typically have the largest impact on the county’s percentage of cash sales.

Nationally, cash sales fell 3.3 percentage points to 33.4 percent in December. — Sean Stewart-Muniz