I practice Buyers Agency exclusively and I get all my leads from the internet so I get a high percentage of foreign buyers. My buyers this year have been truely multi-national. Italian, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani, Egyptian, Lebanese, Spainish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I love this rainbow and this diversity is one of my main reasons for being in real estate.
Coming into a new country and watching property prices fall in the middle of a recession would make me very cautious also. They don't want to commit and I don't blame them. Trying to get their arms around a new country, job, school, culture, local customs, signage, language etc.. Is it any wonder that when they see our property prices fall that they will wait until they feel better about the prospects of getting a good value?
Some buyers are paranoid to the extreme. I have a young couple who are both physicians from India who have been looking while living and renting in Boston for 5 years and even with the fall in prices are still not ready to buy. $125,000 in rent payments later, they still feel that the market is still overpriced!
Maybe they are right, with markets you never know, but if you read my last post you know that my belief is that growth will return to the economy and real estate prices will firm up and move higher in 2010. Unless I miss my guess and of course its only a guess, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of buyers chasing the market higher feeling that they waited too long and missed the bottom.
Frightened Looks on the Faces of my Foreign Buyers
