Buyers covering the full price of a home with out-of-pocket cash are making up a greater share of overall sales in the Cape Fear region. 

Data from the real estate data firm ATTOM show the Wilmington MSA is following national trends. In the first quarter of the year, all-cash purchases made up 35.1% of all single-family home sales in the Wilmington MSA, up 7% year-over-year. 

That’s slightly higher than the nationwide all-cash single-family purchase share of 34.2%, which was the highest level since the first quarter of 2015, according to ATTOM. 

Seller gains – the difference between the most recent and previous sales of a home – reached a median of $106,000 in the Wilmington MSA during the first quarter, marking a 63% jump from the previous year. This is slightly higher than the national average. 

The median sale price in the Wilmington MSA, which is made up of New Hanover and Pender counties, was $330,000 in the first quarter, a nearly 16% increase from the first quarter of 2021 when it was $285,000. 

ATTOM’s nationwide data showed the first quarterly profit margin home sale dip since late 2019, which the firm interprets as a sign “the housing-market boom may be slowing.”

“Home prices simply can’t continue to go up as rapidly as they have for the past few years,” Rick Sharga, ATTOM’s executive vice president of market intelligence, said in the firm’s press release. “The combination of higher prices, rising mortgage rates, and the highest rates of inflation in 40 years may be pricing some prospective buyers out of the market, which means we may begin to see lower sales numbers. Ultimately, as affordability worsens, price appreciation should slow down, and we may even see modest price corrections in some markets.”