Sordid tale of US realty industry is unabated

The latest survey report of a premier US real estate organization fails to depict any brighter prospect of the nation’s realty industry. In accordance with the annual survey by the National Association of Realtors, a U.S. organization of property agents, in spite of dropping prices, international interest in United States property lost intensity in the last year.

As per the survey, from May 2008 to May 2009 foreign nationals paid for an estimated 154,000 homes in the United States, and the number was down from 170,000 in the previous 12 months. Apart from this twenty-three percent of the agents questioned reported at least one contact with an international client, down from 26 percent in 2008 and 32 percent in 2007.

Nevertheless, the study brought to the fore some interesting features as well. It did reveal the sustained importance of overseas buyers to the U.S. market, international transactions accounted for 9 percent of total business, unchanged from the previous year. It is to be noted that the agents in the top four states for international sales — Florida, California, Texas and Arizona — reported their international business actually increased 35 to 45 percent in the period.

Speaking on this, Janet Branton, senior vice president of global business and alliances for the realtors association, stated, “People who have specialized in international are starting to gain bigger market share.” “As the world comes back, we’ll see the market come back,” said Jed Smith, the association’s managing director of quantitative research. “U.S. real estate by international standards is a bargain.”

Want to know more of the sordid tale? As stated by the association’s statistics, in May 2009, with currency exchange ranges fluctuating, the average U.S. home price was $218,300, proportionate to $278,100 in Canada and $237,900 in Britain.

Before I end, as indicated by the survey, majority of global buyers came from Canada, Britain, Mexico, India and China and while the numbers from Canada, Britain and China declined, participants from Mexico and India increased.