Chinese Real Estate investments in China.

Wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and business people have been investing extensively in North American real estate for over a decade. Many of them did it to pass the property to their only child (or children, if more than one) who, after getting a degree from a prestigious US university, remained in the region. Objectives such as getting residency permits for the family have been, of course, a priority that the Canadian and US governments have acknowledged and fostered.

These individuals fleeing China have been buying up luxury properties, high-end real estate, injecting in many cases billions of dollars into the country’s residential-real-estate market. As a result, the industry is scrambling to court the new buyers. Some developers of new projects are installing wok kitchens, following feng shui principles and putting lucky numbers on choice units; while others are packaging property sales with government programs designed to encourage foreign investment. US Real-estate agencies are flying representatives to China, and hiring Mandarin-speaking agents.

In Los Angeles, New York and even Miami, buyers mostly from China (and some from Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea) are really altering the landscape. Here are some examples: at the end of 2012, a Chinese couple paid $34.5 million for a Versailles-style mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California; a year earlier, a Hong Kong businessman paid around $28 million for a nearby estate; in the second semester of 2012, in New York, several full-floor apartments in a new Manhattan high-rise called One57, each with a price tag of roughly $50 million, were sold to Chinese buyers.