Roughly one in three homes are bought with cash – the highest level for over 60 years.
Both the number and proportion of cash purchases have been climbing in recent years.
There were one in four cash purchases before the financial crisis. Immediately after the crash, the proportion of cash transactions grew, but not the number.
The proportion grew only because the total number of mortgaged transactions fell away sharply.
The Council of Mortgage Lenders says that last year, the proportion of cash purchases was likely to have been at the highest level in post-war years.
By contrast, mortgage lending has failed to recover, with the number of mortgaged purchases remaining “significantly lower than in 2007”.
According to the CML, London is the region with the lowest proportion of cash transactions – at 27% – in England and Wales.
The region with the highest proportion of cash transactions is the south-west at 40%, followed by Wales with 36%.
The CML’s research also found that people paid very similar prices for homes whether bought with cash or a mortgage.
The large majority of cash buyers are aged 55-plus.
The CML research follows a claim by Hamptons that two-fifths of homes sold in the last 12 months have been bought with cash, and that 60% of one-bedroom properties were cash purchases.
Is this really a surprise? The Insurance companies have and are ripping off peoples pension funds. This age group now also have pension freedoms to invest as they see fit rather than rip off annuities. No doubt some will prefer to pay the tax and get their funds out of insurance industry’s suspect pension schemes and into property.
Like selling of council houses and now housing association housing without replacing it leads to shortages when population is increasing. Indeed what successive Governments have been doing is asset stripping.
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