My co-CEO Simon Henry was on CNBC Asia in April talking about the countries where Chinese buy the most expensive homes.
Looking at his list, I noticed that the U.S. was not on it. Why not?
It’s because the U.S. is a destination for buyers at every price range. The countries with the most expensive average price for Chinese buyers tend to attract only premium customers.
Chinese buyers certainly spend a lot of money on American real estate.
Bob Knakal in New York City estimates that the next several years will see more than $50 billion of Chinese cash injected into Big Apple real estate alone.
Other estimates put total Chinese outbound real estate investment in 2015 at about $20 billion.
The U.S. is the No. 1 market for these investments, well ahead of second-place Australia and runner-ups such as the UK, Canada and Germany.
Besides real estate, Chinese are America’s top source of tourists, foreign students and visiting retail spenders.
Despite all this, the U.S. is not among the 10 countries where Chinese spend the most on average for real estate.
No, topping that list is the Caribbean paradise of Saint Kitts and Nevis, where Chinese buyers look at property with an average price of $11,918,651.
Also on the list are Indonesia (think “Bali”), Monaco, Saint Barts, Fiji and Jamaica.
In some cases, Chinese buyers are paying more for a home in the US than in these countries. But the US also attracts huge numbers of buyers at other price points.
So the U.S. has tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Chinese buyers in the $200,000 to $1.5 million range. It also has a smaller, but still significant, number of consumers in the highest price ranges. Feed them all into the calculator, and you get an average Chinese buyer price of $725,510.
This amount is more than two and a half times higher than the February existing home median sales price of $202,600.
The takeaway for agents is that there might be a Chinese buyer at every price range.
In some of my other stories for Inman, I’ve given advice on how to reach these buyers. Read those stories for tips on how to succeed with this buyer niche.
Andrew Taylor is co-CEO of Juwai.com. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
