'Home abroad' gaining traction with purchasers

"A Chinese national bought one of our houses at Arcadia in Irvine after reading about it on a blog," Tri Pointe CEO Doug Bauer said in a telephone interview. "It was a Chinese blog. We couldn't even read it."

Hui Hui Huang, a Taiwanese lawyer based in Shanghai, agreed last week to buy a five-bedroom Tri Pointe townhouse in San Mateo, near San Francisco International Airport, for $1.38 million. She and her husband were looking for a US home as they develop a smartphone app to help diabetics better monitor insulin levels.

"We said, 'wow, this is really attractive and serves our needs'," said Huang, 39, who went to law school in San Francisco with a classmate who also bought in the project.

UBS turns to Chinese commercial real estate

Property buyers scouring the world in diversification drive

Even as prices climb, US real estate remains a relative bargain for Chinese investors, according to William Yu, an economist at the University of California at Los Angeles' Anderson School of Management.

Two-bedroom condominiums in Shanghai's Pudong New Area cost about $1 million, almost twice as much per square foot as condos in West Los Angeles, according a report by Yu last month. The Pudong units command $1,400 a month in rent compared with $3,300 in Los Angeles.

"From an investor's point of view, it's better to be a landlord in LA than Shanghai," Yu said in a telephone interview. "If you compare the rent-to-income ratio, it's much better in Los Angeles than Shanghai."

Some wealthy Chinese have come up with ways to evade the yearly $50,000 per-person limit on taking money out of the country so they can buy US real estate, Yu said. Methods include laundering money through Macao casinos and cooking the books of import-export companies, he said.

"A lot of people over-invoice export proceeds so they can park some money outside," Ha Jiming, chief investment strategist for Goldman Sachs Group Inc's China investment management division, said at a Los Angeles conference in April.

Sales of US houses to long-term foreign residents and nonresident buyers accounted for about 7 percent of the $1.2 trillion of existing-home transactions in the year through March, the National Association of Realtors said.

Chinese and Canadians were followed by buyers from India and the United Kingdom, with investors from each of the countries spending a total of $5.8 billion on US homes. Mexicans spent $4.5 billion, making them the fifth-largest international buyer group.

The share of money arriving from China is likely to keep growing, according to Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.

"It's just the beginning of a tidal wave," he said in a telephone interview.

Overseas buyers are changing Arcadia, according to Nunez, 55, who has lived in the city since he was 6 years old.

"You drive every street, and there are three or four new houses being built," he said. "It's just incredible, the demand."

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