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Are the Chinese causing higher-end California home prices to remain high?
2010 Mar 5, 1:38am 14,888 views 66 comments
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www.library.ca.gov/crb/02/07/02-007.pdf
There are 11.5 million houses in California. Estimating them to be worth, say 100K each. Perhaps there are some investors from china coming in here, but I'm betting not enough to hold that out.
Everyone says, people move every 5-7 years, lets use 10 years. That is 1.15M homes per year?
1.15M X $100,000 each = $115,000,000,000
That is quiet a bit of money. Granted they wouldn't have to buy them all up, only enough to cause prices to go up. Maybe 10% of those houses? So 1,150,000,000 per year, and they could perhaps influence the housing here. Assuming houses cost 100K of course.
The Chinese sovereign wealth fund with their hundreds of billions of USD is not interested in owning single family properties. That would make no sense.
As for private investors:
"...buying houses for their families and investing in factories and other facilities to be closer to the North American market.â€
Chinese buying/opening up factories in the US? That's good to hear. Americans opening factories in China is the much, much, much more common news.
I highly doubt private Chinese investors have any impact on the US housing market, beyond what an immigrant from India or the UK or wherever would.
I don't think many chinese investors from China are affecting the market. Being a long range landlord would be hard. Plus, buying a California house on Chinese salary would be pretty tough.
Chinese immigrants living here, on the other hand, absolutely are. Go to an open house in Saratoga, Cupertino, Los Altos, and majority of the visitors will be Chinese or Indian. I think that these immigrants are willing to spend a higher percentage of income on owning than are people born in the US. So they'll give up the fancy car and drive a Camry, don't go out to expensive restaurants, then use that money to buy in the desired neighborhood and school district.
Some people really prefer to own property, which is obviously not the case for a lot of the patrick.net posters who enjoy other things more.
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Are the Chinese causing higher-end California home prices to remain high?http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fi-china-invest4-2010mar04,0,2280130,full.story
"Private Chinese investors have begun to get into the action but, according to analysts, have generally been involved in small transactions, buying houses for their families and investing in factories and other facilities to be closer to the North American market."