When it comes to homebuying in New York City, Wu-Tang Clan put it best: Cash really does rule everything.

All-cash buyers accounted for more than 60% of the 17,924 home sales in the five boroughs over the first half of this year, according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for NYC Neighborhoods.

Ariana Shirvani, senior program manager at the organization, said all-cash sales tend to favor wealthy people and corporate investors while making it even harder for other New Yorkers to purchase a small piece of the city.

“The report speaks to a deepening inequality in both who can buy homes in New York City and who can keep them,” Shirvani said.

Nationally, all-cash purchases made up about a quarter of home sales between July 2024 and June 2025, according to recently released data from the National Association of Realtors. The remaining three-quarters involved buyers who paid some of their own money upfront and took out a mortgage to cover the remainder.

In New York City, the current scenario is almost the reverse. And the eye-popping rates of cash purchases were especially high in the East Bronx, Queens and other areas.

In City Council District 13, which includes neighborhoods like Throgs Neck and Pelham Bay, just five of the 325 buyers took out a mortgage to complete their purchases in the first half of the year, according to the Center for NYC Neighborhoods’ review. The rest paid in cash.

Queens had the highest total number of all-cash sales, with 4,132 out of roughly 6,000 total purchases in the borough included in the analysis. For homes that sold for more than $3 million in Manhattan, nine out of 10 buyers paid for the entire property upfront.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods, a nonprofit network of homeowner advocates and legal groups, used public property records to analyze sales of one- to four-family homes, including condos and co-ops, in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2025. They excluded Staten Island, which uses a separate recordkeeping system.

Cash buyers have a distinct advantage in the housing market because sellers tend to consider them more reliable, with no risk of a lender imposing restrictions on a sale or the loan falling through altogether.

“Cash is king because there are no strings attached,” said Mike Davis, a real estate agent specializing in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “It guarantees certainty for sellers and in this turbulent economy that is 2025.”

Davis, who did not take part in the analysis, said about half of his clients pay for their homes in cash and these sales are typically faster than those requiring financing.

That reality can benefit homeowners with valuable properties in the city as well as buyers who have been able to save up or use the proceeds of a previous property sale. But it can also favor institutional investors and speculators who are often hard to identify and intend to resell, or “flip,” properties over families intending to buy and live in a home.

The report finds flipping was especially common in the same East Bronx neighborhoods where cash-buys dominated, along with Jamaica and other parts of Southeast Queens — a trend documented by other researchers.

The authors say a new state law approved in May could put the brakes on flipping by forcing owners to wait three months before selling to corporate buyers.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods and other homeowner advocates are urging state lawmakers to curb speculation favorable to corporations by enacting an ownership disclosure law to reveal the people behind anonymous companies scooping up homes. They’re also calling for a “flip tax" surcharge on sales made within two years of a purchase. A bill introduced since 2021 by state Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Catalina Cruz — and co-sponsored by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — would impose a hefty fee on sellers: up to 65% of the difference between the purchase and sale price if a home is resold in less than two years.

Center for NYC Neighborhoods Executive Director Christie Peale said more homeowners may be turning to cash-buyers because they themselves are facing financial distress due to unemployment, stagnant wages and inflation — a situation that could worsen amid a potentially grim economic outlook due to rising costs and uncertainty at the federal level.

The report also found new foreclosure filings nearly doubled over the first six months of 2025 compared to the second half of last year. Homeowners facing foreclosure are concentrated in low- and middle-income sections of the city, like Central Brooklyn and Southeast Queens, where people of color make up the majority of residents. The same neighborhoods were also the city's locus of the 2008 mortgage crisis, when hundreds of New Yorkers lost their homes to foreclosure.

Peale said the situation has ripple effects because many people who sell property out of financial hardship often turn to rental units for their next home.

“It limits competition in the rental market if people hold on to their homes,” Peale said.