When it comes to real estate in Florida, would it shock you to know that Canadians are big time buyers?
Foreign home buyers in Florida come from a wide variety of countries. However, ten countries accounted for about 70 percent of reported foreign sales. Canada continued to be the major country of origin followed by the United Kingdom according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors in Florida which means they bought up 1/3 of all the properties purchased by foreigners in the past year.
When you look at the prices it hardly seems like a brilliant move however. Here house prices just keep getting higher, but in Florida you are looking at a market that still hasn’t recovered from years gone back and a fifth of Canadian-purchased properties in Florida over the past year sold for less than $100,000. So when you consider that last year in total Canadians spent nearly $2.2 billion U.S. on Florida homes, that is a LOT of property.
What are we buying? Mostly condos in the top go to destinations like Tampa and Fort Lauderdale for vacation purposes.
How are we buying them? Well someone has pocket change obviously because according to stats eighty-nine per cent of the Canadian purchases were cash transactions!
Some are buying for investment purposes though as well….and why not? As the Florida market continues to improve there is money to be made PLUS I hear they don’t get much of that white stuff in Florida so there may be a couple of good reasons to consider a purchase away from home!
Still….we haven’t got top spot overall. It is the Chinese buyers that are actually the fastest-growing group in the U.S. residential market, nearly doubling their share, to 16 per cent, over the past five years.
What do you think? Would you consider buying a place under the palms?
Source: National Association Realtors Florida
