News/Commentary

China spent a whopping 6.1 BILLION on US properties, more than other foreign countries: report

July 21, 2022 | | Print Article

Concern and outrage is brewing over a new report from the National Association of Realtors showing that Chinese nationals purchased $6.1 billion of U.S. residential real estate property between April of 2021 and March of 2022.

This makes China “the largest foreign buyer [of U.S. residential property] in terms of the dollar volume of homes purchased,” according to the report.

Look:

(Source: National Association of Realtors)

However, Chinese buyers represented only six percent of all foreign buyers. Percentage-wise, Canada came out on top at 11 percent, while Mexico came in at second place with eight percent.

This means that Canadians and Mexicans purchased more U.S. property than the Chinese. However, the smaller (relatively speaking) number of properties bought up by the Chinese were worth more money.

Of the properties purchased by all foreign nationals, 44 percent were bought “for use as a vacation home, rental, or both.” That’s 27 percent higher than the number of “all existing home-buyers” who purchased property for similar usage.

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As for their destinations, the Chinese appeared to prefer buying property in California (31 percent) and New York (10 percent), two liberal cities that decidedly voted for current President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.

Biden is relevant because his son, Hunter, is currently under federal investigation in part because of all the shady business deals he’d pursued in China.

The National Association of Realtors’ report has sparked concern and outrage because of the double standards.

The majority of other nations don’t allow foreigners to purchase property. And those that do impose deep “restrictions” on where and how much foreign nationals can buy, according to QRIUS.

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Why? Because allowing foreign nationals to purchase domestic property all willy nilly is a gateway to problems.

“First, the citizens of a nation have first claim on the land there. Second, it is potentially dangerous to allow too much of a nation’s land to fall into the hands of foreigners,” QRIUS notes.

Take farmland. The more domestic farmland that foreign nationals purchase, the more power said nationals have over the country’s food supply.

“Massive Chinese investment in American farmland is troubling for one very obvious reason: It puts the food security of the nation in the hands of a hostile foreign power. But there is also the social cost of allowing foreign buyers who have effectively unlimited resources to compete on the real estate market with smaller domestic buyers,” according to QRIUS.

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“It is understandable if no one reading this has any tears to shed for Big Aggie, but the real victims of this are smaller landholders. For those concerned about environmental issues, ask yourself who is more likely to practice good stewardship of the land — American farmers or Chinese bureaucrats thousands of miles away.”

The good news is that a bipartisan coalition of congressional Democrats and Republicans want to crack down on these purchases.

“The push to drain China’s influence from the U.S. economy has reached America’s farm country, as congressional lawmakers from both parties are looking at measures to crack down on foreign purchases of prime agricultural real estate,” Politico reported roughly a year ago.

“House lawmakers recently advanced legislation to that effect, warning that China’s presence in the American food system poses a national security risk. And key Senate lawmakers have already shown interest in efforts to keep American farms in American hands.”

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But judging by the latest numbers from the National Association of Realtors, it doesn’t appear Congress ultimately did anything.

Trump-endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters hopes to change this. Running in Arizona, Masters said in a recent interview that he wants to ban such purchases.

“It’s obscene that we would allow Chinese Communist Party stooges to profit off our resources. These are basic mistakes a serious country would never make. They are flooding us with fentanyl, launching cyber attacks, stealing our IP, and our current crop of failed leaders seems more or less OK with it. That needs to change,” he told Breitbart.

Vivek Saxena
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