LA TIMES: Southland homes draw foreign cash

[proverbialwisdom]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-foreign-home-buyers--20140709-story.html

Southland homes draw foreign cash

By Tim Logan
July 9, 2014

A record amount of foreign money is flowing into the U.S. housing market. And the Southland is a prime destination.

Overseas buyers and new immigrants accounted for $92 billion worth of home purchases in the U.S. in the 12 months ended in March, according to a new study out Tuesday from the National Assn. of Realtors. That's up 35% from the year before, and the most ever.

Nearly one-fourth of those purchases came from Chinese buyers. And the place they're looking most is Southern California. Among U.S. cities, Los Angeles was the top destination for real estate searches from China on the realtor.com website, according to the study; San Francisco was second; followed by Irvine.

The report highlights the growing effect of global capital on some local housing markets. The $92 billion amounts to 7% of all money spent on homes in the U.S. during those 12 months, and nearly half of it was concentrated in a handful of cities, including Los Angeles.

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[proverbialwisdom]

1. Bloomberg: Chinese Cash-Bearing Buyers Drive U.S. Foreign Sales Jump

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-08/chinese-cash-bearing-buyers-drive-u-s-foreign-sales-jump.html

Chinese Cash-Bearing Buyers Drive U.S. Foreign Sales Jump
By John Gittelsohn Jul 9, 2014 7:47 AM PT 130 Comments


Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
Construction at the Playa Vista community development in Los Angeles, on March 19, 2014.

Related: Chinese Cash Buyers Boost U.S. Property

Henry Nunez, a real estate agent in Arcadia, California, met with so many homebuyers from China that he bought a Mandarin-English translation app for his phone.

The $1.99 purchase paid off last month, when he sold a five-bedroom home with crystal chandeliers, marble floors and two kitchens, one designed for smoky wok cooking. The buyers were a Chinese couple who paid $3.5 million in cash.

“Last year, it would’ve been $2.8 million,” said Nunez, a property broker for 27 years in the city 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Los Angeles. “The biggest driver is a lot of people wanting to invest their money here.”

Buyers from Greater China, including people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, spent $22 billion on U.S. homes in the year through March, up 72 percent from the same period in 2013 and more than any other nationality, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday in its annual report on foreign home purchases. That’s 24 cents of every dollar spent by international homebuyers, according to the survey of 3,547 real estate agents.

Chinese purchases of U.S. homes are likely to continue increasing as the country’s swelling ranks of affluent consumers seek refuge from pollution and political and economic uncertainty, according to Thilo Hanemann, who tracks cross-border investment for the New York-based Rhodium Group.

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[proverbialwisdom]

2. Yahoo Finance: U.S. housing market in recovery...thanks to China?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-u-s--housing-market-goes-global-143716386.html

U.S. housing market in recovery...thanks to China?
By Bernice Napach
July 9, 2014 12:12 PM

Yahoo Finance

It's not just institutional investors that have been propping up the U.S. housing market. Foreign buyers are also buying in. The National Association of Realtors is reporting that international buyers accounted for $92.2 billion of U.S. home sales during the 12 months ending in March 2014-- 35% higher than the same period a year earlier.

"This is actually good news ... and is helping the U.S. housing market recover although it's not helping it recover nationwide," says Rick Newman, senior columnist at Yahoo Finance. "This tends to be in coastal markets: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, to some extent Florida."

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[proverbialwisdom]

3. Washington Post: The Chinese are coming, and they’d like to buy your house

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/15/the-chinese-are-coming-and-theyd-like-to-buy-your-house/

The Chinese are coming, and they’d like to buy your house

By Diane Francis July 15 at 6:00 AM
Diane Francis, former editor of Canada's Financial Post, is editor-at-large of the National Post and a professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

The Chinese are on the move. In 2014, a record number of Chinese, 100 million, are expected to travel abroad, an army roughly as big as Mexico’s population. They will visit family and friends, and real estate agents as well as tourist sites such as the Great Pyramids, Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building — the educated and well-heeled beneficiaries of the biggest economic rocket ride in history. They have money in their wallets, an appetite for the good life and ants in their pants.

Still, you can’t blame them for feeling unsettled at home. Beijing’s aggressive anti-corruption sweep has netted thousands of big fish, and more confiscations are on the way. Pollution has created an asthma epidemic, food safety scares are commonplace, and China’s economic pace ebbs. There is still no true dissent or freedom of expression allowed. So the country’s wealthiest are on the move and want a better life for themselves or their children.

Some 9.3 million Chinese have immigrated in recent years, and 64 percent of the country’s remaining rich households — a category that includes a few million people — want to leave or are in the process of doing so.

The United States is their preferred destination, and American real estate is becoming their new T-bills, a safe-haven asset. Like bullion, it’s an asset class denominated in U.S. dollars, safe from confiscation and, when necessary, bought anonymously to hide wealth from governments or creditors or ex-partners. But unlike bullion, U.S. real estate can earn income, provide a roof and help obtain a visa.

A modern-day Chinese emigration wave is already underway, but a tsunami may soon hit America’s shores. This month, U.S. real estate Web site Zillow begins publishing its entire U.S. real estate property database in Mandarin on the biggest real estate Web site in China. This means Chinese buyers can surf the Net to find properties near family and friends in their price range. “The fact that Zillow is going there is huge,” says Hall Willkie, president of New York real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales. “The Chinese may just overwhelm the United States with purchases.”

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[proverbialwisdom]

4. Asian investors spent $1.3 billion on Los Angeles buildings in the first half of the year.

http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-robinsons-asian-investors-20140912-story.html

Chinese developer's $420-million purchase of Robinsons-May site closes

By ROGER VINCENT
September 11, 2014 5:22 PM

* Asian investors spent $1.3 billion on Los Angeles buildings in the first half of the year
* Asian investors continue to show a strong preference for trophy assets in global gateway cities,' analyst say

Underscoring the rapidly growing influence of Asian investments in the region, a Chinese investor group has sold one of the most desirable properties in the country to a development firm from China.

The $420-million deal clears the way for a long-planned luxury condominium and retail development on the former Robinsons-May department store site on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

The transaction — one of the largest in recent years — comes as Asian investors, mostly from China and Singapore, are buying existing buildings at an increasing pace and starting to do their own new large-scale development.

This was an opportunity to develop a high-profile, entitled property located in one of the most recognizable cities in the world.
- Laurie Lustig-Bower of CBRE Group

Asian investors spent $1.3 billion on Los Angeles buildings in the first half of the year, surpassing the $795 million they spent on buildings there in all of 2013, according to real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc.

In the Beverly Hills deal that closed Wednesday, the eight-acre former department store site was sold by a group of investors led by Hong Kong private equity real estate firm Joint Treasure International to Wanda Group, China's largest property developer.

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