Foreign Buyers Flood our Market:

With Inventory levels tight and rising prices, the last thing our red hot real estate market needs is more demand.  Yet, that is exactly what we have and it is providing even more support for our housing market.

The appetite for U.S. real estate continues to flourish, but international buyers are shifting their sights from luxury to less-pricey properties. This may be due to overall higher home prices, along with a stronger U.S. dollar, which both cost foreign buyers more at the negotiating table.

Foreign buyers purchased $102.6 billion of residential property in the U.S. between April 2015 and March 2016, according to NAR's annual report on international activity in U.S. real estate.

The number of properties purchased rose 2.8 percent to 214,885. The value of homes bought by foreigners was typically higher than the median price of all U.S. homes.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said that foreign purchasers' overall sales dollar volume was the second highest since 2009.

Chinese purchasers continued to outpace all others, with their dollar volume exceeding the total of the next four ranked countries combined. Their dollar volume of sales, at $27.3 billion, was a slight decrease from last year's survey but was still three times as much as Canadian buyers, who were ranked second. Chinese buyers also bought the most expensive homes at a median price of $542,084.

London had been a favorite of foreign investors, but the impact of the Brexit vote is already hitting the housing market there. Buyers from the United Kingdom were the fourth-largest consumer of U.S. real estate in the data that was gathered before the Brexit vote.

As for U.S. destinations, five states accounted for half of foreign buyer purchases: Florida, (22 percent), California (15 percent), Texas (10 percent), Arizona and New York (each at 4 percent). Latin Americans, Europeans and Canadians, who historically favor warmer climates, were most prevalent in Florida and Arizona. Asian buyers flocked to California and New York. Texas was more a mix of buyers from Latin American, the Caribbean and Asia. Texas may be more of an investment play, as demand for single-family rentals there remains strong.