Cash deals for half the homes sold in Baltimore last month
In half the home sales in Baltimore last month, the buyer paid cash -- or the equivalent to it from the seller's point of view.
Cash and cash-like deals are much more common in the city, where investors are buying foreclosures and can't easily get bank financing, than in the counties around Baltimore. Still, nearly 15 percent of the suburbs' sales -- about one in seven -- fell into that category in September.
That's according to statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence.
So what's the deal with "cash-like"?
"Hard money" loans to real estate investors from other local investors look like cash at the settlement table and are usually recorded as such, folks in the trade say. (Hard money loans tend to be short-term and high-interest.)
The city's level of cash purchases has been high for a while, as this story notes. September of last year was basically on par with last month, with 188 cash deals vs. last month's 185. Last month's percentage was a bit higher -- 51 percent compared with 48 percent a year earlier -- because the total number of sales fell.
Perhaps not surprisingly with so many cash-y deals, nearly 40 percent of homes sold in Baltimore last month went for less than $50,000 -- about 140 in all. Nearly 1,000 more were up for sale in that price range as of September, in case you're looking.
Are you looking for a fixer-upper, or do you want the seller to do the fixing?
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Comments
Loans from traditional lenders to investors buying in poor and transitional neighborhoods have almost completely disappeared. This has been the case for several years now. Around half of the households in the city are rentals and many neighborhoods don't seeing any owner-occupant homebuyers (and haven't for years). There are going to be some really significant problems occurring in Baltimore (beyond the ones we already have) if the lending environment doesn't improve soon.
Posted by: Jason | October 24, 2011 8:37 AM
When investors are buying foreclosures & short sales it just means the rich are getting richer and the burgeoning gap between economic classes continues to grow...
Posted by: Richie Rich | October 24, 2011 3:09 PM
This shows what happens if you can't get a legitimate mortgage, most folks can't buy a house. That leaves the door wide open for investors, good and bad, to snap up these houses. Owner/occupancy is rarein current purchases.
Posted by: rob strupp | October 24, 2011 10:22 PM