Impact of Dollars Coming Home on Residential Real Estate?

[WDCRob]

Does anyone have a feel for how a serious dumping of dollars would impact residential real estate?

I can see how equities, commercial real estate and non-strategic companies might be natural targets for purchase by foreigners looking to get out of US currency, but haven't seen anything about housing.

My guess is that it would be fairly limited, but I'm curious if anyone's seen anything that looked at the question in depth? Or even has a more informed guess than mine.

[zoog]

Re: Impact of Dollars Coming Home on Residential Real Estate?

Does anyone have a feel for how a serious dumping of dollars would impact residential real estate?

I can see how equities, commercial real estate and non-strategic companies might be natural targets for purchase by foreigners looking to get out of US currency, but haven't seen anything about housing.

My guess is that it would be fairly limited, but I'm curious if anyone's seen anything that looked at the question in depth? Or even has a more informed guess than mine.

My probably equally uninformed guess would be that any significant foreign capital going into American real estate would be focused on commercial. A few wealthy foreigners buying vacation homes in the States isn't going to make a dent, and I can't imagine it would be worth the trouble to a high-net-worth foreign investor or foreign investment fund etc to go through the transactions on a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand homes. They might buy into a residential homebuilder if they thought the housing slowdown was over and the stocks were undervalued. Apparently, they've already bought many of the derivatives based on our residential mortgages... that may have killed their appetite for some time to come.

[touchring]

Re: Impact of Dollars Coming Home on Residential Real Estate?

Foreigners can't wait to dump all US assets. I even changed my $1000 plus balance in my paypal account to euros!