U.S. homes attractive to overseas buyers

Source: AP

Weak dollar, flat prices are factors
Tuesday, December 25, 2007 3:00 AM

NEW YORK -- Panden Rota, a Nepalese producer of fine rugs, is about to become a Manhattanite, the owner of a sumptuous apartment in the luxurious downtown neighborhood of Battery Park City.

His primary residence will remain Katmandu, but his new home will allow him to spend more time at U.S. showrooms that display his rugs and with a brother and sister in New York. "I looked at many places and I decided that a Manhattan apartment will always hold its value," he said.

Rota is part of a growing wave of foreigners who buy second homes in the U.S. for work and play and as an investment.

Cosmopolitan cities such as New York and Miami have long served as second homes for affluent and accomplished foreigners. But the trend is growing. One in five American Realtors has sold a home to a foreign investor in the past year, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The events of 2007 have made the U.S. much more affordable for international home buyers. Severe dollar declines against the euro and pound have made U.S. homes much cheaper for Europeans. But even foreign buyers without that sort of currency advantage are benefiting from sharp drops in housing prices at a time when problems in mortgage lending are keeping many Americans out of the market.



Read more: http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2007/12/25/ap_re_invest_1225.ART_ART_12-25-07_D1_C38RRCN.html?sid=101

US wages and the dollar won't be worth squat. Only the uber-wealthy will own homes. The rest of us will live in tents cities and provide services.

Ain't life grand?

...that only those citizens who own property should be allowed to vote.

I didn't know what to say to that...:wow:

our homes become their vacation spots.

lovely

Great news for Vail. How about Flint or Toledo?

One illness and wave goodbye to that penthouse in the sky. :hi:

:kick:

but shortsighted in the larger sense.
A man that sells fine Nepali rugs and buys a second home to spend more time in showrooms might be better off doing something else. Few people go to galleries to buy rugs while losing their apartments.

Yes, Manhattan might receive a temporary reprieve from this, but doing this, so soon in a recession is foolhardy. He might watch as sales slow to a trickle... and if sales slow, he may have to watch his galleries close, one by one, as discount (high-end) stores like ABC Carpet and Home take sales away.

He caters to the affluent, who are becoming an endangered species. Not a good move.

First off, the subjects of such nations (that's us, to name one) are impoverished and angry. Wealthy foreigners could easily bring down ire, especially as the Bush War Against the American People steps up into it's Penultimate and Final Phases, when most people will be REALLY getting crushed beneath the wheel.

Second, wealthy foreigners may want to consider that the wholesale looting and tyranny of the nation, it's basic services and public infrastructure, might not completely be oblivious to them. They will be able to use their money to neutralize much of what The Amerikan Peasantry is suffering, but they will still breathe the same polluted air and often eat the same polluted food, particularly since the Empire is in the business of information suppression and all it's exeuctive agencies have been Bushified/Nazified.

Yes, everything is cheap and the natives are beaten down, but there is down side, froeigners. Plus, for the wealthy foreigner who still live in what remains of the Free World, it might be personally repugnant to spend any time in a tyrannized totalitarian state like Imperial Amerika, where everything is pretty much a lie.

They wouldn't be able to foresee this until they got here, or might think they could rise above it.

Think again.