Following skyrocketing demand from Chinese homebuyers in Westchester and Fairfield counties, real estate company Houlihan Lawrence has launched a Traditional Chinese-language version of its website.
The website is the result of increasing requests from the growing number of Chinese clients to the Westchester real estate company to provide them with better digital home-buying tools.
Among international buyers, Chinese clients account for the largest number of property purchases in the U.S., according to the National Association of Realtors.
Chinese buyers represented 28 percent of total sales for the one-year period ending March 2015. About 86 percent of those purchases were in cities and suburbs. About half of Chinese buyers bought residential real estate.
For the first time, clients from China exceeded all other international buyers in terms of unit purchases and dollar volume, buying $28.6 billion worth of U.S. property from March 2014 to March 2015, an increase from $22 billion during the same period a year earlier.
This figure has quadrupled from the $7 billion total seen in 2011.
Elizabeth Nunan, vice president of global business development at Houlihan Lawrence, said interest in the Chinese buyers market started around 2014 when she and two colleagues traveled to China to attend the Luxury Portfolio Immersion Conference.
The three-day event aimed to give real estate professionals a better understanding of Chinese culture and traditions that might affect their home-buying choices.
Nunan said she and her firm “really started to pay attention” to the online aspect of that demand in 2015 after noticing web traffic to their firm”™s website from China more than doubled compared with the prior year.
According to data collected by Houlihan Lawrence, its new Chinese website has been viewed thousands of times since its launch a month ago, with the major sources of traffic coming from Google and Houlihan Lawrence’s partnership with Chinese news site Epoch Times. Users of the new page are Chinese speakers primarily from the Americas and Asia.
Nunan said that these buyers are “looking for a little bit of everything” when it comes to real estate. Typically, those seeking an investment property will stick closer to New York City, while the residential buyers her agency works with venture toward Westchester and Fairfield counties.
Of the growing number of buyers from China, many are searching for economic stability, seeing U.S. real estate as a low-risk investment for their cash following the recent volatility in Chinese markets.
Additionally, providing their children with an American education is also a priority for many potential homebuyers.
Another factor, one that may not be so obvious to those who live stateside, is health.
As air pollution in China reaches dangerous, potentially life-threatening levels, a growing number of buyers are searching for the “green grass, trees and fresh, clean air” they”™re unable to attain in their homeland, Nunan said.
She recalls seeing gas masks in the hotel during her recent trip to China. After initially attributing their use to possible terror threats, she soon learned they were to be used during extreme smog levels.
In order to supplement this increasing demand, Houlihan Lawrence has also brought on 12 Mandarin- and Chinese-speaking agents in hopes of giving potential buyers “an easier home-searching experience,” Nunan said.
These agents are made up of a mix of both non- and native Chinese.
Also by popular demand, agents typically communicate with Chinese buyers through WeChat, a popular messaging app in China.
Demand from this demographic in Westchester and Fairfield counties tends to follow the West Coast, Nunan said.
Buyers from China typically follow a “natural progression” of buying property on the closer-to-home West Coast, most frequently California, before deciding to look for opportunities on the other side of the U.S.
From there, Nunan said it”™s common for buyers to invest in New York City real estate, then decide to move north toward Westchester and Fairfield counties in an attempt to “spread their wings.”
Despite a stronger U.S. dollar and an increase in home prices stateside, Nunan said that she expects this relatively new trend of Chinese home buying to continue.
“I don”™t have a crystal ball,” Nunan said, but she predicts the number of Chinese homebuyers looking to U.S. real estate to grow slowly, likely not at the “staggering” pace the market has seen in recent years.
“There”™s still a definite interest in the market,” she said.
