Americas pandemic-era cash-buying boom is fading but its still king for certain home sales

America’s pandemic-era love affair with buying homes in cold, hard cash is finally cooling.All-cash purchases accounted for 31.4% of US home sales during the first four months of 2026, down from 32.3% a year earlier, according to new Realtor.com research.And cash buyers are retreating faster than the housing market as a whole: The number of cash sales dropped 11.2% year-over-year, compared with an 8.5% decline in total home sales.That’s a shift from the pandemic years, when buyers routinely ditched the mortgage to elbow their way to the front of bidding wars.But don’t declare the death of the cash buyer just yet.Cash remains more common than before the pandemic — and in certain cities, and at both extremes of the housing market, buyers are still plunking down the entire purchase price without borrowing a dime.“We’re really just in this holding pattern,” Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com and author of the report, told The Post.During the pandemic, cash was a battering ram.With buyers fighting over scarce listings, an all-cash offer could vault one bidder over a pile of competitors.Today, buyers have more options in many parts of the country as inventory has recovered and competition has cooled.“In a lot of the country, the market is a lot less competitive,” Jones said.“You don’t have to come forward with cash in every situation.”But cash hasn’t lost its appeal to sellers.

Its superpower has simply changed.During the pandemic, Jones said, sellers viewed cash as “the best offer of a lot of really good offers.”Today, with financing harder for some buyers to secure, cash can instead be “the most solid, stable, reliable offer” — one that isn’t going to collapse because financing falls through.Cash used to help buyers win the race.Now it can help sellers make sure they actually cross the finish line.The national decline hides a striking divide over who is still reaching for the checkbook.More than two-thir...