Fewer home buyers in the Twin Cities are paying cash and why that's a good thing

Fewer home buyers in the Twin Cites and beyond are paying cash for their homes these days. A new report from CoreLogic shows that in the Twin Cites metro 19.5 percent all sales during April were cash, down 5.3 percentage points from last year. Statewide, cash deals represented one in four sales compared with 33.7 percent nationwide. That shift is widely viewed as a positive sign for the market because most cash buyers are investors and fewer investors in the market is a sign of dwindling distressed sales. In fact, real estate-owned (REO) sales nationwide had the largest cash sales (56.6 percent), but those REO transactions made up only 7.4 percent of all sales during the month. That figure peaked in January 2011 at nearly 50 percent when REO sales made up 23.9 percent of total home sales. Resales make up the majority of home sales (about 81 percent in April 2015), so have the biggest impact on the total cash sales share. Here's a look at the state-by-state data: