2010 Foriegn Buyer Update

ListOverseas.com continues to market your properties to overseas buyers. We are happy to announce that we have a little over 3/4 Billion Dollars in properties listed. This is our first newsletter of 2010 designed to inform you of the current overseas market for American property.

  

 

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Market Update

Foreign Buyers Flocking to U.S. Housing Market
by Aleksandra Todorova - Consumer Action
"There definitely is more interest in U.S. properties, no question about it," says Mark Partin, president of Toronto-based Trailridge Property Corp., which brokers deals between U.S. developers and Canadian investors interested in buying residential properties in "bulk."
For many foreign buyers, property in the U.S. is downright cheap. Canadians now get an 80% discount on what they would have paid for a piece of the U.S. just three years ago, when one Canadian dollar was worth just 80 U.S. cents and properties in some areas were 50% more expensive, Partin notes. (One Canadian dollar is now worth roughly $1 in U.S. currency.) For European buyers, whose currency carries 25% more buying power in the U.S. than it did just three years ago, today's depressed property prices are no less attractive.
While Americans are discouraged by images of neighborhoods blighted by "For Sale" signs and taped-off properties, foreign buyers are much more optimistic, especially about the long-term health of the U.S. market, says David Michonski, a certified international property specialist and CEO of Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy in New York. "The foreign buyer has an unbridled confidence in the U.S. market that is lacking in the domestic purchaser today," he notes. "They view this as the bargain of a lifetime and are terribly excited about it."
 

Foreign buyers snap up U.S. real estate
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
Real estate agents are increasingly courting foreigners to buy homes in the USA — hiring agents fluent in other languages, marketing to foreign buyers and in some cases, offering to pay the airfare and hotel bills of foreign shoppers who buy a home.
The agents are eager to win the business of foreign investors who are swooping in to buy property in the USA as home prices plummet and the dollar's weak value produces eye-popping deals for international buyers.
Because of the sinking value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies, a home bought by a foreigner comes with a discount averaging 30%, the National Association of Realtors estimates. Between April 2006 and April 2007, about 30% of foreign buyers came from Europe, according to an NAR survey.
Nearly one-third of Realtors reported in that survey having had business with foreign buyers. Activity is especially busy in affluent cities such as New York and in warm-weather vacation destinations such as Miami and San Diego. Many of these investors, Realtors say, are buying homes as vacation retreats.
"With these prices, you can't say no," says Monique Burger of Belgium, who's buying a Miami Beach vacation condo for $270,000. "With the low dollar against the euro, it helps. And the low housing prices made us want to buy."
   

Where they're buying!
by ListOverseas.com Market Watch Team
  • After sensing that a renewed interest in U.S. real estate from abroad was brewing, the National Association of Realtors did a study last year on the topic.
  • Almost one-third of NAR members surveyed had at least one international client between April 2006 and April 2007. Buyers were often coming from Mexico, the United Kingdom, Canada, India and China. Forty-nine percent of them made their U.S. purchase in the South region of the country, followed by 31% who sought out real estate in the West.
  • Forty-seven percent of foreign buyers purchased a U.S. home as a vacation home for family and friends and 22% made the purchase as an investment and rental opportunity. Thirty-one percent bought the home both for a place to vacation as well as a place to rent out.
  • Twenty-eight percent of foreign buyers made their U.S. home purchase with cash.
  • The weakness of the dollar helps explain why the very wealthy are making purchases in major international cities, including New York, said Francois Ortalo-Magne, associate professor of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
 
 
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