Local expert calls out real estate website's false claim that 71% of ABQ home sales in October were 'all cash'

Yahoo

29-01-2025

Jan. 28—The story read like something out of a horror movie — at least for potential homebuyers in Albuquerque looking to finance their purchase.
"In the high-desert city with a population of more than a half-million, made famous as the setting of AMC's 'Breaking Bad,' 71% of home purchases were all cash in October 2024," read a portion a Realtor.com story posted Jan. 18. It alleged Albuquerque was the No. 1 U.S. city for all-cash purchases.
The story found that Albuquerque's all-cash share was more than double the national average, which accounts for 34.6% of home purchases.
But the story, written from what Realtor.com said were the latest figures it compiled for all-cash purchases, used faulty data, according to a local real estate expert.
The true share of all-cash purchases in October? Roughly 14.4%, according to Albuquerque Realtor and past president of the Southwest Multiple Listing Service, Tego Venturi. That October number for all-cash purchases of homes in Albuquerque, Venturi added, falls more in line with the annual percentage of 14.6%.
The Southwest Multiple Listing Service, or SWMLS, a subsidiary of the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors, is a database of properties for sale covering Central New Mexico, Venturi said. The data from the SWMLS are also used to track real estate trends in the area.
The Realtor.com story, which didn't use SWMLS data and which was taken down after the Journal reached out for comment last week, caused a bit of a stir in the local residential real estate scene, Venturi said. It's left some wondering: Is this percentage from Realtor.com for all-cash sales last year true? And if so, what could this mean for those looking to buy a home?
"It could scare potentially some first-time buyers," Venturi said. "I did see people making that comment that it would make them believe that they had no chance in ever owning a home, or that they can't compete with these cash buyers because they've got to get financing and (have) a low down payment."
Venturi first encountered the Realtor.com story earlier this month when he made a Facebook post sharing data on how Albuquerque homebuyers were purchasing single-family homes. Another local real estate agent commented on Venturi's post about the story from Realtor.com, asking if he could confirm the data was accurate.
That led Venturi to contact Realtor.com and ask how its team came up with the data associating Albuquerque with the highest percentage of all-cash sales in the country. Venturi said he didn't get a response for a few days.
It "looks like there was something amiss with the data" and that the company was "digging into it," a spokesperson for the company, Asees Singh, wrote to the Journal in an email last week.
Singh didn't get back to the Journal with a reason why the data may have been inaccurate. But Venturi said he was able to recently chat with Danielle Hale, Realtor.com's chief economist, who told him that the company pulled public records, "meaning she's using county record data, which will record a record of sale." Hale didn't immediately respond to a Journal request for comment.
"I asked her, 'Well, how many properties did you account for when you did that? Because all you did was report the percentage, not the not the number of closings,'" Venturi recalled. "And she said, 'It was like, 2,200.' I'm like, 'Well, there's your problem. You're counting something other than residential sales because residential sales were around 900 or so in October.' She came up with (her number) based on county records, and so it looks like what they were doing was counting land sales."
Data provided by Venturi and SWMLS for 2024 show about 60.8% of single-family homes last year were purchased with conventional loans. The next biggest type was Federal Housing Administration loans, making up about 15% of all purchases. Next was, of course, cash sales. Veterans Affairs loans made up just over 8%; seller-financed purchases were under 2%.
Over the past seven years, according to the data, all-cash sales for Albuquerque home purchases hovered anywhere from a low of 11.6% in 2020 to a high of 17.7% in 2022. Venturi said those numbers dismiss the notion that all-cash buyers are buying up all the homes in the city, particularly the belief that "Wall Street people are buying all the homes."
"That's just not happening here in Albuquerque," Venturi said. "The message has got out there some, but I think more people (need to) understand that we are not a big cash-buyer city. ...We are people just trying to raise their families and live their lives."