Real Estate has always been the ultimate in a local business, but those boundaries are ever expanding. The International Division of the National Association of Realtors gave us these statistics to alert us to an emerging market. Between April 2010 and March 2011, there were 82 billion of residential international sales amounting to 7% of the total U.S. residential market. This is an increase of 16 billion from the previous year's volume of 66 billion.
"Increasingly, more and more Realtors are working with international clients who want to buy property in the U.S." Ron Phipps NAR President 2011.
International sales were split evenly between non-resident foreigners and recent immigrants, with immigrant buyers who have been in the U.S. less than two years, accounting for half of the U.S. foreign buyers with 41 billion. International buyers of U.S. residential real estate came from 70 countries. The top five, Canada, China, Mexico, U.K., and India accounted for 53% of all transactions from March 2010 to March 2011. Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas accounted for 58% of all transactions with international buyers. Proximity to the home country, convenience of air transportation, climate, and location were the most important considerations to international buyers.
When we look outward we learn that China is poised to possibly become the world's largest economy this decade and India's middle class is already larger than the entire U.S. population. The important conversation today is how to unlock the growing global middle class around the world, and what it means to us. Many are predicting that within 10 years more people in the world will be middle class than poor for the first time. This increase is associated with a significant geographical shift of wealth from developed to emerging nations and economic activity that will rearrange many key future decisions.
This growing middle class in these emerging nations will buy more, want more, travel more, and create a new layer of homeowners. Working in this arena will require a different skill set and knowledge. In Real Estate it is becoming even more tricky to navigate through the huge layers of complexity in language, culture, local lifestyle, currency, measuring scales, financial and mortgage criteria, tax regulations and more.
How is the Real Estate community reaching out to all of these incoming buyers?
Realtor.com, the largest online destination for the U.S. real estate listings, expanded its worldwide reach with the launch of their international website Realtor.com/international featuring listings from Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Croatia, and Spain. It is well positioned to become the dominate choice for buyers in many countries around the globe. By the end of 2011 the site already featured over 700,000 international listings from 11 countries. Add this to the 3.7 million listings in the U.S. and it is clear that Realtor.com is going to be huge website.
Realtor.com is capable of allowing anyone to shop online globally. You don't need to understand the global market or even the language of any given country. Listings not only have the local price you can convert to one of 20 currencies and review in one of 11 languages. By August 2011 Realtor.com/international was already tracking over 800,000 visitors outside the U.S. from a total of 10 -13 million unique monthly visitors.
The largest brokerage portal was launched in late 2011 www.Global.remax.com by RE/MAX LLC. This is considered to be the very first integrated global website by a residential real estate company. As most countries do not have MLS operations, and brokerage companies do not have partnership agreements with data providers worldwide, the launch of RE/MAX's international site www.global.remax.com is quite a substantial achievement.
At the time of the www.global.remax.com launch the site contained 300,000 listings from Brazil, France, Italy, India, Portugal, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. with more than 70 countries and territories around the world. The site allows buyers to search for properties in 30 languages, translate currencies and find the latest international real estate news. Every RE/MAX listing will be available to anyone in those more than 70 countries to search in their own languages and currencies.
If you are planning to stay in the Real Estate business you should diligently prepare now to begin serving a multicultural base of clients, no matter where you live in the U.S.
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