In January of 2011, nearly half (46%) of all home sales in the United States were made as all-cash transactions. By August of this year that percentage had slipped to 33.8%, down 2.4% from August of 2013.

The five states with the highest percentages of all-cash home sales are Florida (49.8%), Alabama (48.9%), West Virginia (45.0%), New York (44.4%) and Delaware (44.0%). The five states where all-cash sales are lowest are the District of Columbia (19.0%), Maine (20.7%), Virginia (21.9%), Maryland (22.6%) and Minnesota (22.6%).

Among the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, the top five in all-cash sales were:

• West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach, Fla., tied with Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla.: 56.3%
• Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.: 55.3%
• Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia, Mich.: 54.9%
• Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Deerfield Beach, Fla.: 54.8%

The metro area with the lowest number of all-cash sales was Syracuse, N.Y., with 14.1%.

ALSO READ: Florida Leads U.S. in Annual Foreclosures

The data comes from research published at CoreLogic, and the data on metro areas was calculated using cumulative sales from the prior three months.

The largest share of the all-cash sales by type came from real-estate owned (REO) properties, where all-cash sales accounted for 56.9% of all REO sales. All-cash sales of existing homes accounted for 33.4% of total re-sales, and all-cash short sales comprised 31.8% of all short sales. Only 16.5% of new homes were sold in all cash deals. CoreLogic noted that while the all-cash percentage of REO sales remains very high, REO sales accounted for just 7.2% of all home sales in August.

CoreLogic also noted:

A trend to watch is the cash share of re-sales, which has fallen almost 14 percentage points from its peak cash share of 47.2 percent in February 2011. This category will determine the direction of cash sales going forward, since re-sales make up the largest share at 80.4 percent of all sales.

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