When it comes to buying a home in Denver, cash is king.
What's happening: Cash offers — which most buyers can't put up — are a sign of a tight market, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.
In this dog-eat-dog environment, there's little hope that steep mortgage rates will bring prices down, especially considering high borrowing costs don't deter cash buyers.
State of play: The proportion of Mile High City houses bought with Benjamins recently hit its highest level in a decade, according to data provided to Axios Denver by the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
The region saw a 65% increase in March cash sales from 2020 to 2021, and another 5% jump in March 2022 compared to the previous year.
The big picture: Denver's rush of cash closings reflects a nationwide trend.
Homes sold for cash across the country reached a new peak of 28% this March, the highest point since the crisis years post-2008, when a lot of home sales were foreclosures, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Zoom in: Within city limits, the latest market data from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors shows it's still tough to house hunt in this market.
As of April, single-family home listings year-to-date were down 2.4% from 2021, while the number of days homes were listed on the market dropped 38%, to just 10 days.
At the same time, median home sales prices in metro Denver rose 15% — to $717,000 — from April 2021 to April 2022.
The bottom line: Homebuyers in the Denver area are not only wrestling with surging mortgage rates but also having to weigh whether to cough up cash offers to win all-out bidding wars.
The cutthroat competition is making it difficult for many people hoping to buy a home.
Read more on Axios.
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