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.
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