Cash still rules home sales

SARASOTA-MANATEE — Fewer people are spending cash to buy houses in Manatee and Sarasota counties, but it still represents more than half of all home sales. According to the most recent monthly data available from CoreLogic Inc., 58.3% of all home sales in February were paid in cash. That was a decline of 3.1% percentage points from February 2014.

Data for much of the rest of the Gulf Coast were not immediately available.

Real estate owned by the lenders (REO) sales had largest share of the Manatee and Sarasota counties' cash sales in February, at 59.8%, followed by resales (37.6%), short sales (34.3%) and newly constructed homes (15.8%).

The percentage of cash sales in the two-county region was considerably higher than the national average for the month, at 37.9%, and was only slightly higher than the state average of 54.6%.

Florida had the highest percentage of cash home sales in February, followed by Alabama (51.9%), New York (48.4%), Indiana (47.8%) and Michigan (44.9%).

Cape Coral-Fort Myers had the second-highest percentage of cash sales (59.4%) of the nation's largest 100 Core Based Statistical Areas, behind only Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia, Mich (60.5%).