Realtor.com published its read on cash buyers this morning and the trend is quietly the best news your purchase pipeline has had all year. All-cash purchases are running at 31.4% of sales year to date in 2026, down from 31.6% for full-year 2025 and 33.2% at the 2023 peak. That is not a collapse, but the direction has held for three straight years, and it is the single most useful fact you can hand a buyer who has lost a bidding war. Pair it with the Redfin Home Price Index out the same morning — prices up 0.27% in July and 3.4% year over year, the fastest annual pace in a year — and the picture for a financed buyer is better than it has been: fewer cash offers to lose to, and an asset that is still appreciating while they wait. Nobody in your market is emailing about the cash-share number, because it takes ten seconds to explain and it does not sound like news.
The rate side is not your hook today. Bankrate's 30-year is 6.71%, two basis points above yesterday, 12 basis points above a month ago, and sitting in the upper third of its 90-day range of 6.47% to 6.82%. Rates have stabilized in the high sixes and there is no honest way to sell that as movement. So the marketing focus is competitive positioning rather than payment savings, and the segment is your active purchase files — particularly the FHA and VA borrowers, who were never really competing against cash in the same price bands and whose sellers now have measurably fewer alternatives. The refi cohort worth touching is still the 7.25%-and-up group: on a $400,000 balance, 7.25% to today's 6.71% is roughly $145 a month, which clears break-even on standard origination cost inside about two years. Below 7.25% the math does not carry the call.
The tactical move is to stop writing the pre-approval letter as a compliance document. Every buyer's offer comes with one and they all read identically, which means yours is doing nothing to differentiate the offer it is attached to. Rewrite it as a one-paragraph financing summary a listing agent can actually use: the specific verification you have completed, your average close-to-close time in days, your direct line, and a sentence stating you will personally take a call from the listing agent before they present offers. Send the new version to your five most active referral agents with one line asking whether it helps them advocate for the offer. That conversation is worth more than the letter, because it puts you in the room where the offer gets discussed.
rewrite your pre-approval letter template into that financing summary, then send it to the one agent who has brought you the most files this year and ask what is missing from it.