This may be a helpful trend in many ways. At least 8,000,000 homes have been foreclosed.
Why not? China is polluted. And homes here are a pittance compared to homes in China. It's a good investment.
Mr. MO: In Beijing and Shanghai, probably you'll need to start with the halfmillion U.S. dollar to buy a good area, a good, you know, apartment here. If you're going to buy a house or something, you probably need to have, you know, two millions to five million U.S. dollars.
KUHN: Mo got around 400 applications for the 40 slots on the first group, which includes quite a few real estate professionals. There will be bargain hunting and site seeing in New York, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mo says that officials from Australia, Singapore and Spain have recently contacted soufun.com and expressed interest, too.
http://www.npr.org/...
If the US hits the latest figure, 1 million foreclosures in 2010, that will be a total of over 8,000,000 foreclosures when tallying 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Foreclosure filings in the U.S. will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac Inc. said.
This year’s filings will surpass 2008’s total of 3.2 million as record unemployment and price erosion batter the housing market, the Irvine, California-based company said.
“We are a long way from a recovery,” John Quigley, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview. “You can’t start to see improvement in the housing market until after unemployment peaks.”
Foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000 for the ninth straight month in November, RealtyTrac said today. A weak labor market and tight credit are “formidable headwinds” for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a Dec. 7 speech in Washington. The 7.2 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007 are the most of any postwar economic slump, Labor Department data show. Unemployment, at 10 percent last month, won’t peak until the first quarter, Quigley said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
The trend of wealthy internationals buying up our foreclosed homes, including the Chinese, could helpful in the following ways:
- Maintain real estate values, tax revenues, and help save education. Unless states and towns are sweetening the pot by offering internationals special tax break deals. We can all hope not. Are the banks that foreclose paying local and real estate taxes and fees while their homes are empty?
- If, via immigration laws, the international, wealthy home owners are allowed to live here then the local economies will benefit including laborers like landscapers, painters, plumbers, carpenters, etc.
- Our children will be able to be immersed in other international cultures which will help them prepare for competition when they graduate from college/university.
- The more money that is brought from other countries into our country will help reduce government deficits on all levels.
- These international wealthy homeowners might find it reasonable to invest in new business models here so that their children won't have to commute across oceans to continue to run their fathers businesses.
Well, these are just a few benefits we might glean by having international wealthy players buying up our foreclosed homes. Can you think of some more benefits?
Here's a couple of other stories about this Chinese trend.
Chinese American Engineer Creates Foreclosure Search Engine
By Vivian Po, Jul 7, 2010 1:21 PM
Since the real estate bubble burst, the Chinese newspaper World Journal has reported on "foreclosure bus tours" -- groups of prospective homebuyers who have traveled from China to view foreclosed homes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Now Chinese newspaper Sing Tao Daily reports that a Chinese-American engineer has created a search engine to make it easier for those who want to buy foreclosed homes.
http://ethnoblog.newamericamedia.org...
The wealthy Chinese investors pay cash. No need for a mortgage.
If you were extremely wealthy, would you want to raise you family in this pollution?
Shanghai pollution hits male fertility
Many Chinese cities, including Shanghai, are polluted
Severe pollution has caused a dramatic rise in male infertility in Shanghai, a new study published in the Shanghai Daily has found.
The study, by the Shanghai Family Planning Research Institute, found that sperm counts among men in the city have dropped 12% since 1987.
In a survey of 1,000 donors at the city's main sperm bank last year, only 20% had a sperm count that was highly fertile, the Shanghai Sperm Bank said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
Or this:
Asia's Airborne Toxic Event
Don't adjust your monitors: Natural light has become 10 to 25 percent dimmer in cities such as Beijing, Karachi, Shanghai and New Delhi as 3-km thick "brown clouds" of pollution spread across Asia and elsewhere, according to a new UN report.
As the picture above (and this alarming satellite photo we previously shared) indicate, countries like China are plagued by a vast Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC) made of "more than three-km thick layer of soot and other man-made particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean," the result of burning fossil fuels and biomass. This may not be news to many, but the UN report makes vividly clear just how murky things have become.
http://www.treehugger.com/...
So, of course wealthy Chinese people would want to move their families to a cleaner place to live at a fraction of the cost of a home in China.
Telecommuting and transocean flights make this possible.
Of course, this trend raises many questions?