How common are cash buyers in Manhattan Beach?
Last year, nearly half of all local home sales – 45% – were coded as all-cash purchases in the MLS.
In fact, the share of cash purchases has been increasing steadily since 2020, when the share was at a relatively low 22% – half the rate of 2025. It's been 5 straight years of increases since then.
Each of the past 4 years saw recent highs for the percentage of cash sales, ranging from 34% to the aforementioned 45% last year.
What's more, if we go only by MLS sales data which do have a record of the type of financing buyers used (ignoring some sales left blank), the percentage of cash sales rises 1-3% for each year in our chart. It is at 48% for 2025 by this calculation.
We were prompted to dig out this data by a client's sincere question: Do sellers usually see a lot of cash buyers?
Um, yes!?
Gathering the Data
We've definitely heard chatter about this topic recently. We've even seen some others present data – we think data that they got from title companies, but they didn't cite sources. (You should cite sources.)
As we compiled our own data, we speculated that 2020-21 might turn out to have lower shares of cash purchases. Good guess. The hypothesis: Mortgages were so cheap, even cash-heavy buyers almost felt that they had to take a loan. (We remember those days.)
Was the cash-purchase rate "declining" before COVID-19 and those low rates?
Maybe, maybe not. The data showed that 33% of purchases in 2018 were all-cash, while the figure was 28% both the year before and the year after. Maybe 2018 was just a little more cash-heavy?
Some day, perhaps we'll run the data for years prior to 2017. It'd be interesting to see the trend before 2017-18, but we're going to go ahead and speculate (again!) that we won't find cash-purchase rates that even approximate the recent trends charted above.
The Flood of Cash Buyers Began Fairly Recently
There's something going on here.
The topic is wide-open for comment and further speculation, but we'll share just one anecdote.
It was 2013 or 2014, and we had a big Hill Section property that we represented. Our (SoCal) buyer had paid all-cash, but had second thoughts before starting a remodel. We found a new out-of-state buyer to take the property, who paid all-cash also – a lot more than acquisition. It was all dizzying.
For a lot of us here, that period time was a clarion-call of a moment, when really big money started flooding into Manhattan Beach real estate. There had been hints of that right after the Great Recession, as cash came into MB real estate as a "safe haven." Then the trend built, and so it continues today.
One thing you see in the news but not really on the ground here in MB: "Corporate" or "Wall Street" entities gobbling up local homes to serve as rentals.
The cash we see here is personal – either proceeds from a recent home sale, or, quite often, personal assets built up over time.
Can You Win with Financing?
Alright, so, the elephant in the data here is... Buyers who are taking financing to buy in Manhattan Beach are barely a majority anymore.
Does that make you feel like being regular-type person who actually needs a bit of a loan to buy in a multi-multi-million-dollar community puts you at a disadvantage?
Don't fret.
Sure, cash buyers definitely get a smile from a seller. They come in without the potential uncertainties around a loan. (The appraisal contingency. What's that even for, again? And making sure the loan gets approved. Usually not too hard if the buyers are vetted, but... what if?)
Yet, cash buyers sometimes try to throw their weight around. (When we have cash buyers, we try to throw their weight around!) The sellers don't always like it. Cash often isn't the high bid.
You can beat a cash buyer if you're a financed buyer. We just saw that happen on one deal recently. And it wasn't crazy.
Sellers are always looking at the whole package. The advantages of cash don't always win out.
Although, again, in 2025, cash did take properties 45% of the time, which is a pretty good record. (It's not clear how many of those sales involved competitive bidding in which a cash buyer prevailed. All we know is that buyers closed with cash.)
In 2026 (from Jan. 1-March 10), cash purchases have totaled "only" 33% of closed sales so far. That's just 49 closings, so don't draw too big of a lesson yet.
We'll note that in some of those other data presentations we've seen, MB stood head-and-shoulders above other South Bay cities with the share of cash purchases. But before we accept that as fact, we'd like to run our own numbers.
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Sources & Notes
Nerdy notes: Data compiled by Dave Fratello and MB Confidential from MLS-reported sales data.
We downloaded absolutely all data in the MLS from all of the sales for 9 years in Manhattan Beach (2017-2025). Using a custom-built script, we sorted all of the sales by the type of buyer financing reported in the MLS by listing agents at the time of closing.
Agents have several options in the MLS to use to report buyer financing, but "cash" by itself is a pretty clear and self-explanatory category – hard to screw up.
A small number of transactions in each year's data simply have nothing input for the type of buyer financing. As noted in the story, the percentages given above rise by 1-3% each year if we limit the data to those for which there is something input for financing. Here's what the chart looks like if we re-figure the numbers to ignore the blanks. From MLS data alone, we just cannot know which angle is more accurate.
Most imperfections or imprecision in the data would come from agent inputs – and it's not hard to imagine that there will be imperfections and imprecision for that reason. Our guess would be that the rate of imperfection and imprecision might be pretty similar from year to year, which should make comparisons more reliable.
Nerdy artificial intelligence disclosure: Our "script" to run these calculations was built with help from A.I., but, on principle, we never let A.I. do our writing or our math. For instance, we don't upload data to A.I. and ask for the results.
Instead, we build frameworks, scripts, calculators and mini-apps to automate the work that we have normally done by hand. We have visibility into each step of the process. We cross-check results. This way, we save time, but also have confidence in the data. We imagine that's what everyone does, but hey, not sure!
Should we look at other markets? Now that we have these nifty mini-apps, it would be easier to compare MB to other South Bay markets or comparable luxury markets, in a manner similar to some of our regional analyses, like "How 2025 Sales Ranked All Over SoCal."
We can also refine our numbers to do some comparisons by areas of MB – how much cash in the Sand Section versus East MB, for instance? You know, that's just the sort of thing we would do. We'll come back to this.
