International buyers are making Miami stand out from other cities' housing markets – in a good way.
The Miami housing market scored praise from influential analysts and commentators at the International Real Estate Congress in Miami, an event hosted by the Miami Association of Realtors (MAR) and National Association of Realtors (NAR) that is attended by hundreds of the world’s real estate professionals, from far away as Russia, Brazil, Mexico, France, Spain and China.
Though Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist and the event’s keynote speaker, was bearish in his assessment of national housing, he had many good things to say about Miami’s market, namely that as national home prices fall in 2012, Miami’s will likely appreciate at a 10 to 12 percent rate.
International buyers, it turns out, are a major source of that appreciation, according to a World Property Channel piece on Yun’s speech.
“Currently over 68 percent of all residential sales last month in Miami-Dade County were to foreign buyers, of which over 86 percent was paid in cash,” stated the piece. “As for the entire State of Florida, over 25 percent of all residential sales in 2011 have been to international buyers.”
A big source of that foreign investment is from Latin America, especially Brazil, where a favorite exchange rate with the U.S. dollar allows many affluent Brazilians to purchase Miami condos at up to a 40 percent discount.
Condo Vultures CEO Peter Zalewski, another presenter at the event, said in the World Property Channel piece, “Over the last 4 years South Florida has effectively become a laboratory of how to resolve and process the U.S. housing crash.”
He continued, “Miami has now entered a new era of property expansion with another 17 newly proposed condo towers for Miami in the planning process that could deliver over 4,700 new units into the market within the next 2 years. But the difference now is ‘Latin American financing’ – developers are getting up to 80 percent of the purchase price in cash up front.”
MAR projects that Miami will break every Dade-County sales record in the history of the county in 2011 – and that includes the boom years, such is the power of international investment.
As one delegate at the conference said, “It truly is a difference world down here in Miami; the laws of gravity no longer apply – again.”