Foreign investors continue to park their money in New York City at a steady clip, but the influx of cash from places like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia is no threat to the market’s “return to normalcy,” Jason Haber of Warburg Realty told Fox Business.
The big difference between these investors and the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” going out and buying homes, Haber said, is that foreign investors pick up properties as a safe haven for their cash.
“They are looking at long-term appreciation and a safe investing environment,” Haber said on the program. “They’re not running the math and saying, ‘what’s my yield going to be on this, what kind of return am I going to get?’”
For these all-cash buyers from overseas, the New York market remains a relative bargain when compared to markets like Paris, Singapore and — “for now,” as Haber put it — Moscow.
To that end, while Haber acknowledged that U.S. sanctions against Russia could hurt such high-dollar real estate transactions here, the full impact is not yet clear.
“It’s a part of the market but there are so many investors coming from so many parts of the world, it remains to be seen if that has any impact,” Haber said. [Fox Business] — Julie Strickland