Home buyers in the Greater Boston area increasingly are finding themselves competing with foreigners willing to pay top dollar in today's tight real estate market.
Michael DiMella, managing partner at Charlesgate Realty Group in Boston, said his firm has worked with nearly a dozen foreign investors in the past year.
"I think recently they've seen an opportunity to invest in the U.S. and Boston because of the strong market recovery following the recession, as well as favorable exchange rates for many of them and generally lower real estate costs than other major cities around the world," said DiMella, president of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors.
One French client is closing on his fifth condominium, DiMella said, while an Israeli couple has already scooped up three or four condos as investments.
At Keller Williams Realty in the Back Bay, Kathleen Alexander oversees a team of two Realtors, half of whose business comes from China. One of her Realtors, Charlotte Liu, speaks Mandarin and travels there every three or four months with Alexander to promote real estate investment in the Boston area.
Sixty to 70 percent of their clients are buying property to rent out and move into later if they decide to live here, 10 to 20 percent are investors, and the rest are clients looking for homes for themselves.
"In China, people can own their own house, but they have to lease the land from the government, so the idea of owning their own land here is very attractive to them," Alexander said. "And Boston has the cachet of having some of the best universities in the world."
In the past year, Paul Yorkis of Patriot Real Estate in Medway has sold a handful of new condominiums to buyers from China and India.
"Part of it is folks realize the purchase of real estate is a really good investment, and they're taking advantage of good interest rates," said Yorkis, Greater Boston regional vice president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. "The Boston area also is ethnically diverse and has some of the best cultural and educational institutions, which makes it attractive to international buyers."
Those same amenities also make Greater Boston attractive to U.S. buyers, but the inventory of single-family homes for sale here declined on an annual basis by nearly 16.3 percent in March, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, while the median selling price rose for the 18th consecutive month, to $500,000.
None of that was a problem for Lisa Li, a Chinese lawyer who beat out another offer for a Wellesley home last month by paying $1.15 million in cash.
Although the house isn't as luxurious as her home in Shanghai, she wanted to be with her 15-year-old daughter, who attends a private school in Southboro, she said through a translator.
"She can get a much better education here," Li said.
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