The “Myth” of the Foreign Buyer in Chicago
We’ve recently been discussing all of the foreign buyers who are (or might want to be) scooping down to buy up Chicago downtown condos.
It would make sense, right? For the European investor, our condos are 50% off. For the British investor, it’s an even better deal.
Perhaps, these buyers will help prop up the Chicago condo market and prevent price declines.
My question is: Are any of you agents out there actually seeing any foreign buyers?
Because I’m not seeing any foreign buyers on this site. I use an analytic tracker which tells me the countries that my visitors are coming from. Crib Chatter has been active about 3 months now.
Here is the data from my visitors:
- 4,537 visits from people in the United States
- 23 visits from Canada
- 22 visits from Australia
- 8 visits from the United Kingdom
- 2 visits from Germany
- 2 visits from Japan
- 2 visits from Ireland
More people living in Cicero have found this site than all of Europe.
This is non-scientific, of course. Maybe foreign buyers don’t go on Google and do a search to find out information about a building before they buy there. So they aren’t ending up on Crib Chatter. Maybe they don’t do any on-line research before plunking down their money.
But I doubt it.
To me, it seems, the Europeans and Asians don’t seem too interested in finding out about Chicago real estate.
Anyone else with different observations? Has anyone actually encountered the “foreign buyer” with their own eyes?
Thank you for pointing this out. Chicago is great and in many ways better than NYC but in the end it still is not NYC, specifically Manhattan.
If US = Europe, then NYC = London and Chicago = Frankfurt or Berlin. Ever visited? Great livable cities, but definitely not London.
And people talking about the strong Euro/weak dollar encouraging foreign investment in the US…..which is only true if both the US dollar denominated asset increases in value and the US dollar strengthens.
The USD has lost 10% v. the euro since the beginning of the year. Assuming a French investor bought a Chicago condo on 1/1/07, he’d need a 10% rise in real estate values to offset the 10% loss due to the USD.
Good points JK.
Yes, I think the “foreign buyers” are all reading the news about declining real estate as well. Why would they want to buy a declining asset- same as anyone else?
For anyone not paying attention….over the past few years (until last year) the property market in Spain, Croatia, Greece (along the Med. coasts) have been going straight up just like South Florida/Vegas. The same kind of speculative action for Europeans.
No need for them to look to the US for real estate “bargains” when there are just as many in their own backyard.
How many of us are looking for real estate investments in coutries where the dollar goes far? And then narrowing the search to the third largest city in those countries?