We all had fun and learned something a few weeks ago, when MBC published an analysis of the increasing number of cash buyers for homes in Manhattan Beach. (Here's the original post: "Share of Cash Purchases Rose for Last 5 Years.")
Our data, drawn from the MLS, showed that cash buyers made up a remarkable 45% of all home sales in 2025 in Manhattan Beach. That was the highest of the 9 years we charted, and the culmination of 5 years of consistent increases.
A natural follow-up to that post would answer today's question: Where are all these cash purchases being made, within MB?
Admit it, you've got some assumptions. It's good to be aware that you have biases!
Let's start with 2025 data.
What we're seeing here is that most of the cash purchases within Manhattan Beach were made within the Sand Section: 34%.
But other areas aren't far behind.
We grouped all of East Manhattan together, including Manhattan Village. That's a lot of territory. It's also 30% of the cash purchases in the whole city last year.
C'mon. Did you pick East Manhattan to fall second in line? You didn't, did you?
(To be fair, it really is a big chunk of town here.)
The Tree Section was just a bit behind at 28%.
The Hill Section rounds out the total with 8% of all cash purchases.
Remember, here we are looking at the share of all cash purchases in town. The Hill Section is a relatively small area with a pretty low number of annual sales, so even if every sale in the area were all cash, it wouldn't make for a large share of all the cash purchases in the city.
We'll look at how many sales within areas are all-cash in a moment.
First, let's look at two more sample years for the city as a whole.
Here in the 2022 data, we see a notably larger share of cash sales in the Sand Section, up to 42%, more in East MB (33%) and a bit more in the Hill Section (10%).
The Tree Section did not have as large a share of cash purchases in that post-pandemic year as it did just last year. Indeed, at 15%, the Trees had almost half the share of cash purchases then, compared to 2025.
Let's take a peek pre-pandemic.
Before anyone knew what COVID was, the Sand Section was dominating cash purchases in Manhattan Beach, with 43% of all the cash sales happening there.
This might be a good time to note some data from our prior post, which showed that only 29% of home sales were all-cash in 2019. So the Sand Section had a slightly larger share of what was a much lower total number of cash sales.
We see similar proportions for the other areas, with East Manhattan in familiar territory at 28% of all cash sale, the Tree Section at 21% and the Hill Section down at 8%.
Now that we've looked at a sample of 3 years, let's combine all 9 years we studied in one chart.
These are the averages across all 9 years. By now you might find this pattern familiar: The Sand Section drawing the plurality of cash purchases in town (41%), East Manhattan somewhat behind at 28%, followed by the Trees at 23% and the Hill Section at 9%.
Now, what about the number of cash purchases within these areas of town?
This is something of a different angle.
We'll drop all the data on you at once.
On this chart, you'll see how common cash home purchases were within each area of town for all of the 9-year span under study (2017-25).
What jumps out?
It's almost always the Sand Section and Hill Section with the greatest share of cash purchases.
In recent years, you've seen 50%, 60% and even 67% of homes sold within one of those prestige areas sold for cash.
That does not qualify as a surprise. Safe to say, that was probably one of your assumptions when you first opened this post.
The Sand Section has most frequently had over 40% of home sales within the area go all cash. (To be clear, this is very different from cash purchases in the Sand Section also making up about 40% of homes sold for cash citywide.)
Interestingly, the Tree Section had mostly bumped around near 20% cash sales (and 80% financed) until 2023-25, when suddenly 40%-plus of sales in the Trees were cash. Is that the new normal for our treasured suburbs west of the highway?
The share of cash sales over on the East side has also ballooned.
Indeed, as the total share of cash purchases has risen these past 5 years citywide, it might be the fact that more of those sales are in the 'burbs than only the Sand and Hill that has been the main contributor.
Last point: We threw a label on the chart saying "COVID Market," because we were expecting to chew through the period of roughly 2020-22 for possible differences in the data.
But the truth is, a drop in the share of cash purchases is only really evident for the year 2020 for the Sand Section, and 2020-21 for the Hill Section. This was a time when money was so cheap, even cash-capable buyers felt they had to borrow. The effect of ultra-low interest rates was almost gone by 2022.
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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. A small number of transactions in each year's data simply have nothing input for the type of buyer financing. We have used the total number of sales as the denominator, and the known number coded as "cash" as the numerator, meaning some of these percentages might be higher if we had all of the data.
Nerdy artificial intelligence disclosure: Our "script" to run these calculations was built with help from A.I., but we never let A.I. do our writing or our math.
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!
