I was recently having conversations with another market watcher and a client. They were both asking about the number of Cash deals in Boulder County, wondering if the number of Cash deals was mitigating the impact of recent surges in mortgage rates.
As has happened many times in the past, my curiosity got the better of me, so I dug the data out of IRES to see how Cash deals have changed over the last 5 years. As part of acquiring that data I also noticed another trend I want to touch on below.
First, the breakdown of how people paid for the properties they were purchasing in Boulder County. This data was pulled for the period January 1st through September 30th of each year. This includes IRES and RECO data with the automatic de-duplication process. I included Single Family homes, Attached homes, Vacant Land and Farm and Ranch properties.
Surprisingly, the number of cash deals has been fairly consistent over the last 5 years. I couldn’t go back further in time and include RECO data which only goes back 5 years. It would have been nice to have a few of the ultra-competitive, multiple-offer years in the mix to see if that altered the percentages. The percentage bounces around every year, but consistently stays in the 30-33% range. I was also surprised how few other financing options get used, with loans other than Conventional combined ranging from 5-8% of the sales in Boulder County. I would have guessed that a Conventional loan was most common, but would have underestimated its preponderance. Here’s the data for the last five years.
I always like to confirm new data if I can, so I spoke with Anthony Meisner at Land Title who confirmed that he sees about a third of deals at Land acquired with Cash.
On to the second trend. Anecdotally, I keep seeing what seems to be more and more listings in Boulder County entered solely into REColorado and not into IRES at all. Pulling the year-to-date sales data for the last five years gave me an excellent data set to see if this feeling could be confirmed, which unfortunately, it was. Here’s the breakdown between the two MLS systems for sales in Boulder County for the first 9 months of each year, same criteria as above.
I think there are a couple of possible explanations for this change. One, real estate brokers are ranging further and further afield to find deals in the challenging market and bringing their preferred systems with them. Two, brokerage consolidation is a continuing trend and sometimes that consolidation brings a different tech stack. Boulder County has always been on the border of the two systems, so we’ve always been a mixing ground. Definitely something to watch.
The temps are back to feeling like summer, maybe that’s why my football teams are wilting early in the season.