Published October 9, 2026 in Market Update

Cash Buyers in Ridgewood Are Not Who You Think

By Kevin Cavanaugh

Real estate, Ridgewood Market Update Clean v2

People hear 'cash buyer' and picture an unstoppable force. The assumption is that cash wins every time, moves faster, and leaves financed buyers with no shot. I pulled every sale in Ridgewood through October 8, 2026, and here is what the numbers actually say.

Cash buyers are a minority, and the gap in speed is smaller than you think.

Of the 131 sales where the file shows how the buyer paid, 27 were cash. That is 20.6%. The other 104 buyers used a loan. So for every cash sale in Ridgewood, roughly four financed buyers closed a deal.

The speed difference is real but narrow. The typical cash sale closed in 9 days. The typical financed sale closed in 11 days. Two days. That is not nothing, but it is not the landslide sellers sometimes imagine when they hear the word cash.

What surprises most people is what cash buyers paid relative to what sellers first asked. Cash buyers closed at a typical 107% of the first asking price. Loan buyers closed at 97.2%. Cash buyers paid more over the final list price, 120.3% versus 112.1%, but when you go back to what the seller originally put on the market, financed buyers were actually closer to that number.

The typical sold price for a cash buyer was $1,900,000. For a loan buyer it was $1,530,225. That gap tells you something about which homes cash tends to show up on. It is not that cash is more powerful. It is that cash tends to concentrate at the higher end of the market.

Do cash buyers really sell faster in Ridgewood?

Both cash and loan buyers moved faster than the overall market typical of 13 days. That tells you something useful: the homes where buyers competed hardest, cash or not, were the ones that moved quickest. The payment method was not the only thing driving speed.

The homes that sold in the first month, all 111 of them, closed at a typical 115.7% of their last asking price and 119.4% of what they first asked. Those were not all cash deals. Most were not. Financed buyers were right there competing, and winning.

Here is what this means for you, whether you are selling or buying right now.

If you are selling, the bigger story is not who pays cash. It is that 33.3% of the homes currently for sale have already dropped their price, with a typical cut of $150,001. That is where sellers lose money: not by accepting a financed offer, but by starting too high and having to come down. The homes that sold in the first month got 119.4% of their first asking price. The ones that lingered did not. Pricing right from day one is worth more than holding out for cash.

If you are buying with a loan, you are not at the disadvantage people warn you about. You are in the majority of Ridgewood buyers, and the numbers back you up. That said, the rate environment matters. The 30-year fixed rate averaged 7.40% as of October 8, 2026, up from 6.30% a year ago, according to Freddie Mac's weekly rate survey. Know your number before you make an offer, because the sellers who are still sitting with price cuts are the ones who did not price for today's buyer, not for a buyer from a year ago.