Published September 26, 2026 in Market Update

Most Brookside Buyers Paid Cash. It Still Took 81 Days to Sell.

By Liza Elmstrom

Real estate, Brookside Market Update

Cash buyers move fast. No lender, no appraisal, no waiting around. That is what people say, and it sounds right. So when I pulled every sale in Brookside through September 25, 2026, I expected cash buyers to be the ones closing in days while financed buyers sat and waited. That is not what happened.

Cash did not make Brookside homes sell faster

The typical cash buyer in Brookside took 78 days to find a home. The typical buyer who used a loan took 54 days. Cash was slower, not faster. That is a 24-day gap, and it goes the wrong direction from what most people expect.

Cash did not speed things up here. It just meant fewer people were borrowing. Nineteen of the 30 sales where we know how the buyer paid were cash deals. That is 63.3% of Brookside buyers, at a time when cash sales nationally were 26% of existing-home transactions in July 2026, according to NAR. Brookside came in at 63.3% here, 26% nationally.

And yet the market did not reward those cash buyers with a faster close. The whole market's typical time to sell was 81 days. Cash buyers came in at 78 days. Buyers with a loan came in at 54 days. The difference is real, and it tells you something: in Brookside, the thing slowing sales down is not the financing. Something else is at work.

Did cash buyers at least get a better price?

Not by much. The typical cash sale closed at $630,000, and cash buyers paid 96.2% of what the home first asked. The whole market came in at 95.9% of first asking. That is a difference of less than half a point. Cash did not unlock a big discount, and it did not push sellers to take less.

The bigger story in the numbers is how much the market has shifted over time. In the first half of the file, January 2024 to May 2025, the typical home sold in 27 days and got 97.2% of its first asking price. In the second half, May 2025 to September 2026, the typical home took 131 days and got 94% of first asking. That slowdown happened across cash and financed deals alike.

That shift matters a lot if you are deciding on a price today. In the first half, sellers who priced well got within 2.8 points of their first asking price and were done in under a month. In the second half, sellers gave up 6 points from first asking to final sale and waited more than four months. The market did not drift slowly. It moved in a clear direction, and pricing as if it is still early 2024 is the fastest way to end up in the wrong column.

Nine homes came off the market without selling at all. Right now there are 6 homes for sale in Brookside, and 66.7% of them have already dropped their price. That is 4 of the 6 homes currently sitting on the market having already made one move to find a buyer and not yet succeeded. The homes that gave up without selling in this file look a lot like the homes sitting on the market today: priced above where buyers are landing, waiting for an offer that does not come. At the recent pace, it would take 3 months to sell every home currently for sale. That is not a crisis, but it is not a seller's sprint either.

What this means for you, whether you are buying or selling

If you are selling, do not count on a cash buyer to make your life easier or faster. The data says the opposite happened here. Price the home where buyers are actually landing, which is 95.9% of first asking on a typical sale. Nine homes came off the market without selling at all. Starting too high and waiting for a cash offer to bail you out is the most common mistake this data shows. The second half of the file is the market you are selling into right now, and it rewarded sellers who priced for where buyers are, not where sellers hoped to be.

If you are buying, the 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 7.03% as of September 24, 2026, up from 6.30% a year ago, according to Freddie Mac's weekly rate survey. That gap matters for your monthly payment. But in Brookside, the typical buyer with a loan closed in 54 days, faster than cash buyers did. You are not at a disadvantage just because you are financing. Come in with a clean offer and a realistic price, and the numbers say you can compete.