Down payments have stabilized and all-cash deals are dwindling, signs of a cooling US housing market where conditions favor buyers. The ones who can afford to participate anyway.
That’s the short version of a longer story conveyed by new data tallying, among other things, the share of US homebuyers who paid all cash at the end of Q1, and the amount put down by the “typical” buyer who didn’t pay cash.
As regular readers are aware, I’m a bit of a junkie when it comes to US housing market figures. Redfin’s a veritable wellspring of such statistics. I can’t say enough good things about their data and news section.
The figure below gives you a sense of how far afield we are in US housing. On the eve of the pandemic — so, in February of 2020 — the median down payment was $31,350 a figure which, just half a dozen years later, seems unfathomably low. (In May of 2020, when the fate of our species still hung in the balance, that figure was just $23,296.)
Fast forward to March of 2026, and the median down payment was $64,000, the newly-released data shows.
The good news is, that’s actually down YoY. As Redfin’s Dana Anderson noted on Tuesday, slower home-price growth and “less pressure to compete in bidding wars” is leading to smaller down payments versus last spring.
“When housing costs are high like they are now, buyers tend to be more careful about where every dollar goes,” she added.
Indeed. Note that at 15%, the median down payment’s nearly 4ppt lower than the local high in August. It’s down 5ppt from the cycle high in mid-2024, when even the “typical” buyer felt compelled to pony up the “required” (if you want to avoid that pesky PMI) 20%.
Meanwhile, the share of all-cash purchases fell below 29% in March, according to separate Redfin figures.
As the chart shows, that’s among the smallest shares since 2021.
That figure might’ve risen in April and May, though. The share of all-cash purchases is influenced by mortgage rates, and thanks to the war, financing costs have moved up since March.
And yet, as Anderson pointed out late last week, “widespread economic uncertainty,” including that associated with sharply higher oil prices, can also make buyers wary of putting “too much” down.
As she put it, “when the economy is topsy turvy, even affluent buyers who can afford to pay cash may be inclined to preserve money in savings accounts or other investments” (like, I don’t know, shares of Intel) rather than lock it up in illiquid home equity.
Meanwhile, investors — large and small, institutional or otherwise — bought just 45,397 homes in Q1. That was the fewest overall since WHO declared COVID a pandemic, and before that since 2016.
Still, investors bought nearly one out of every five homes sold in Q1 2026, which means their share of the market was actually up from prior quarters and unchanged versus Q1 of 2025.
As the figure above reminds you, the investor share two decades ago was just ~10%.
Many believe investors’ larger footprint in the market is a factor driving up the cost of single-family homes in America.
But don’t worry: Bill Pulte will fix it. Right after he’s done reshuffling the Fed board and reading 10,000 pages of classified documents to get up to speed for his new role as director of national intelligence.
