Excerpted from S&P Global article.
Chinese investors who for years have focused exclusively on gateway U.S. cities are starting to venture into smaller markets, industry experts say.
Chinese buyers, looking for safe capital havens and second residences, have been driving home prices in Seattle and Miami to new highs in recent quarters and are now increasingly going after commercial property in the two markets.
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High-net-worth individuals also are now making a splash. Robert Granda, director for retail investment sales for South Florida at the real estate and financial services firm Franklin Street, said wealthy individual investors and syndicate funds have been swarming the market, but quietly.
“They’re not making a huge splash,” he said. “They’re doing everything very quietly.”
Granda said many individual Chinese investors have local “handlers” in place to source deals, translate and facilitate the paperwork. He recently brokered a deal for a retail center in central Broward County, north of Miami, with a group of Chinese investors that was simultaneously closing on an office building in suburban Miami-Dade County.
“A $30 [million] or $40 million investment in Manhattan is going to get you nothing,” Granda said. “But $30 [million] or $40 million in one of these other markets might get you a suburban office building or a garden apartment complex that could be repositioned.”
