The data on foreign buyers is weak. And likely underplays their influence.
Back in 2006, about 10 percent of California single-family homes were purchased in all-cash transactions, according to the real estate data firm ATTOM Data Solutions. A decade later, it’s nearly 25 percent. That means a quarter of California’s extremely tight housing inventory is unlikely to go to households like the Rothenbergs—moderate-income families who need a mortgage to buy a home.
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“My guess would be that it’s flipped and that foreign buyers are now having a bigger impact than institutional investors,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM.
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Let’s start with this major caveat:
Foreign buyer real estate data is not good. California sales deeds don’t require a buyer or seller to disclose citizenship or residency status. So analysts rely on rough proxies for foreign ownership.
...data relies on a survey of realtors, and could be undercounting.
“For one thing, the survey is conducted in English,” said Oscar Wei, senior economist for the California Association of Realtors. “So if you have Chinese buyers and Chinese agents, they may not necessarily want to participate in a survey written in English.”
Wei also acknowledges that
Realtors may not always know the citizenship status of their clients, and that the timing of the survey could bias the overall results towards domestic buyers.
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The housing market in Vancouver, Canada resembles many California cities. Costs for single-family homes and condos have skyrocketed, making the city and its surrounding suburbs among the priciest places to live in North America.
Vancouver homes have also been a favored destination of overseas investment, primarily from China. Many residents fretted about the influence of foreign dollars on the city’s limited housing stock, but although good data was scarce,
experts figured foreign buyers accounted for about 5 percent of home purchases.
Two years ago, under intense pressure from Vancouver residents, the British Columbia provincial government began mandating that homebuyers disclose citizenship on sales documents.
The data revealed that in fact, 10 to 15 percent of houses were going to neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents.
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https://calmatters.org/articles/data...-neighborhood/
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