The British (and Mexicans, Canadians and Chinese) are coming

From the January issue: Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, may have been cold toward President George Bush at Camp David, but that didn’t prevent him from warming up to real estate farther north on Cape Cod. Recently, Brown snapped up a vacation home of his own in Chatham, where he often spends his summer vacations. Brown may be this season’s most high-profile foreign purchaser of a vacation home in the U.S., but he’s certainly not the only one. Numerous articles have noted how a weakening dollar has kept Manhattan’s real estate market buoyant by stimulating purchases by wealthy foreigners. A survey from the National Association of Realtors noted that among international clients, the top five countries of origin are Mexico (13 percent of all foreign buyers), the United Kingdom (12 percent), Canada (11 percent), India (6 percent) and China (5 percent).