The National Association of Realtors’ top economist believes buyers from other countries may become bigger players in the U.S. housing market in the coming months after they had taken a step back during the first year of the pandemic.

This prediction accompanied a new NAR report detailing how international buyers purchased only 107,000 existing homes here between April 2020 and March of this year — a 31 percent decline from the previous 12 months.

“As travel restrictions loosen and foreign students return to U.S. colleges in the upcoming year, there is likely to be some growth in foreign buying of U.S. real estate,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “High home prices and the ongoing lack of inventory could, however, pose a challenge for buyers.”

American homes purchased by foreign buyers totaled $54 billion in value in that same span of time, 27 percent lower than the previous year’s amount. 

But buyers from certain countries were even more hands-off than others. 

Buyers from Canada, Mexico and China — the three most involved foreign nationalities in the U.S. market — each saw their U.S. home purchase dollar volumes fall by at least half during the pandemic’s first year.

These particularly extreme results were the latest in a four-year period of decline in foreign investment in U.S. residential properties, NAR said in its report. The foreign sales numbers and dollar amounts were at their lowest levels in a decade.

Still, pandemic-era restrictions appeared to play an outsized role in this trend.

Buyers from other countries were less eager to seek out homes in resort areas than in years past, the report said. Otherwise, the breakdown has stayed pretty consistent over the last few years, with nearly half of foreign purchases occurring in the suburbs and 38 percent in urban areas.

International buyers make up only a small portion of the country’s total existing home sales.

Email Daniel Houston

homebuying | NAR | realtors
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