With the declining value of the dollar enticing foreigners into Manhattan’s high-end residential market, Fox Residential Group has started a division that will specialize in selling homes to overseas buyers. Called Fox International Services, the team is led by four of the firm’s experienced, multilingual brokers: Marcia Donen Roma, Annette Elvey, Bahar Tavakolian and David J. Martin.
Among them, the four are fluent in French, Spanish, Farsi, Russian, Polish, Italian, Mandarin and Hebrew.
The brokerage began seeing a surge of international clients about a year and half ago, and the four brokers first started working cooperatively around nine months ago.
“These four brokers were each doing their own thing, and they thought they could do a lot more business with foreign buyers if they started sharing the load—working together rather than trying to handle things on their own,” Barbara Fox, the president and founder of the Fox Residential Group, said.
According to Tavakolian, the majority of the division’s clients are from Ireland, Scotland and, to a lesser extant, England. Other buyers come from the Netherlands, France, Italy, Australia, China and India.
Fox said that the strength of the rental market has meant a lot of the international business consists of investment purchases.
“Not as many [buyers] are moving in permanently,” Fox said. “The market is much more active in the investment and pied-à-terre sectors.”
Tavakolian agreed that most of her foreign clients are looking for investment properties. She described one client from Australia, an executive at an oil company with a background in physics, who wanted to purchase properties entirely based on cap rates and other statistics, and did not want to see a single listing.
“He came to New York for two days,” Tavakolian said. “We just met in his hotel lobby and looked over spreadsheets. I had scheduled showings, but he said he was afraid that looking at a property [could influence him and override the numbers].”