If you have found the home you actually want, we generally would not wait. Trying to time the bottom rarely works, even for cash buyers. You do not know the seller's real motivation (they may need to close by a certain date and be willing to deal), and waiting a few months could just as easily bring more competition as a better price. Nobody can promise where prices go from here, so basing the decision on a forecast is weak footing. Cash is leverage in a negotiation, and that leverage is worth the most while a specific property is in front of you. We have watched buyers sell, plan to buy back in cheaper, and never manage to re-enter, giving up real ground while they waited for a moment that did not arrive on schedule. For an investment purchase, the question changes a little. A reasonable philosophy is to be either fully leveraged or fully paid off rather than somewhere in between. In a volatile stretch of the economy, paying cash to remove leverage risk can make good sense; in a steadier one, you might keep your capital working and finance the purchase. That is a personal call about risk and what else the money could do, and it is yours to make. To pressure-test a specific deal against your own numbers, the free Roadmap conversation (about 20 minutes) is where we run them with you.