Foreign Buyers Swarm to Purchase Florida Real Estate, Florida Homes

Agents, especially Florida real estate agents are seeing progressively more foreigners interested in buying Florida homes in the USA. Many Florida real estate agencies are hiring agents that are 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.

As home prices plummet and the dollar’s weak value produces eye-popping deals for international buyers, foreign investors who are swooping in to buy property in the USA.

The National Association of Realtors estimates, 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%. According to an NAR survey, about 30% of foreign buyers came from Europe between April 2006 and April 2007 to buy Florida homes.

In that survey, nearly one-third of Realtors reported that they had done 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 in Miami 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.”

Agents are seizing the opportunity to make sales:

• A real estate in New York hired staff lawyers who specialize in foreign buyers. Their sales to foreigners jumped from 10% to nearly 25% in the past year or so.
  

• An Atlantabased agency, is wooing foreign clients by hiring agents that speak languages such as Dutch, Korean, Farsi and Arabic. Recently, the agency sold a $2.2 million listing to a British couple who were amazed at the value for the price. The couple had upgraded from a 2,000-square-foot flat in London to a 9,000-square-foot home in Atlanta.
  

• A New York firm is traveling regularly to Brazil to help link buyers with properties, often  ranging in price from $5 million to $15 million. Foreign buyers make up about 20% of sales.
  
  

We are beginning to see a surge of interest, especially from Britain, Italy, Spain and Russia.
We’re a bargain right now for foreign buyers. A lot of them looked two or three years ago and found themselves in too crazy a market.

Contributed by MLR Realty