Investment Property Vultures Are Forecasting An Increase In Asian Investors Buying In The US

Investment Property Vultures Are Forecasting An Increase In Asian Investors Buying In The US

When Susan Sanchez, a Florida real estate agent, received an e-mail a few weeks ago from a man who said he was a Chinese executive and wanted to buy a house, she suspected a scam.

"I thought it was fishy," said Mrs. Sanchez, who is based in Orlando, where Chinese buyers used to be a rarity until recently.

But the executive was real. He hired a lawyer, transferred $150,000 into a trust account for the purchase and is now searching, with Mrs. Sanchez's help, for a three-bedroom house in the range of $90,000 to $150,000.

Agents and industry executives around the United States are reporting similar experiences. Chinese buyers, once a novelty in many areas, are growing increasingly common, heralding what some believe and many hope may be an important new buying group.

Early last year, in the depths of the financial downturn, several groups of investors from mainland China toured properties around the United States, setting off a wave of media coverage.

Many in the U.S. real estate industry saw the trips as an early indication that a wave of Chinese buyers was on its way. And they were right. Many wealthy Chinese investors used to go on these special tour groups heading to the United States, but now many are purchasing sight unseen.

"Trust me, there are going to be a lot more Chinese investors over here," said Paul Brewbaker of TZ Economics, a research and consulting company based in Honolulu. "We're very much in the early stages of this."

Thanks to China's fast-growing economy, its population of millionaires is now the fourth largest in the world, moving past Britain in 2008, according to the 2009 Merrill Lynch-CapGemini World Wealth Report.

Prices in many parts of the United States dropped 25 percent to 35 percent last year, but it is the secure, established nature of the U.S. residential sector especially in comparison to the wild gyrations of many Asian property markets that is particularly attractive to Chinese investors.

"They come to the U.S. not for the huge profit, it's for the stabilized market," said a representative of Investment Property Vultures a well renowned company that deals with many Chinese buyers.

Many of these Chinese investors are seeking the professional assistance of Investment Property Vultures based out of Orlando, Florida. They are one of the experts in the business who specializes in bringing exactly these illusive property deals to the Chinese buyers. Mainly they offer foreclosures and distressed properties but also, government owned properties. Investors anywhere in Asia including China, Hong Kong, and Singapore can contact them via their website www.investmentpropertvultures.com or email them at info@investmentpropertyvultures.com.

In many ways, the interest in U.S. property is part of a general economic shift. Direct investment by Chinese companies in the United States grew to $1.2 billion in 2008 from $385 million in 2002, a 220 percent increase, government data shows.

Officially, China strictly limits its citizens on the amount of money they can invest overseas, usually the equivalent of about $50,000 a year. But industry executives say there are a variety of methods for wealthy Chinese to avoid the restrictions, including overseas bank accounts and trusts.

In 2007 Chinese buyers accounted for 7.5 percent of international buyers in the United States, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors. Although that number dropped to 5.4 percent last year, agents in Florida, California and Texas report a sharp increase in contacts from China in the same period.

Forty-one percent of the Chinese purchases of residential property in the United States last year were in California and Florida, according to the national realtors group. In the past three years, the Chinese population in the state grew by more than 80,000 to about 1.2 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Many buyers have children studying in the United States or have relatives here, said the representative of Investment Property Vultures.

Typically, he said, the buyers are not looking for ostentatious properties, but rather for houses that can be easily rented or resold. "They really buy houses with more flexibility, they understand the market here."

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