![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2283872985.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Foreign buyers purchased just $45.3 billion worth of U.S. existing homes between April 2025 and March 2026, a 19.1% plunge in dollar volume and the second-lowest transaction count since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in 2009. <\/p>\n
The pullback comes even as a weaker U.S. dollar should have made American real estate more attractive to overseas buyers \u2014 a contradiction that mirrors what wealth advisors and immigration specialists have been describing anecdotally for months: a historic reversal in which the ultrawealthy are rapidly falling out of love with the U.S. as an investment destination.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most striking data point buried in the report: New York, long a fixture among the top five state destinations for international buyers, has fallen out, replaced by newer entrants New Jersey and Georgia.<\/p>\n
Matt Christopherson, the NAR\u2019s Director of Business and Consumer Research and author of the report, told Fortune<\/em> that he was surprised. New York state is \u201ctypically in or close to the top five,\u201d Christopherson said. \u201cAnd they were pushed out this year.\u201d<\/p>\n Christopherson said the wider drop-off defies the simple currency logic that normally governs foreign buying behavior. \u201cDespite foreign buyers having stronger buying power with more favorable exchange rates, we still saw them draw back,\u201d he said, attributing the hesitation partly to a \u201cwait and see approach\u201d driven by a turbulent year of trade policy shifts and state-by-state changes to property ownership laws. He agreed that it coincides with a turbulent year in foreign trade and heightened uncertainty with Donald Trump back in the White House, but declined to attribute the data to a straightforwardly political calculation.<\/p>\n \u201cThere might be a little bit of trepidation of these investors saying, \u2018Let\u2019s hold off and wait till it\u2019s a little more certain that we can keep these [properties] and make these investments,\u201d Christopherson said. He noted that the report also tracks buyers who wanted to buy and couldn\u2019t, and the top two reasons cited were being unable to find the right property and costs. Buying in America is just kind of a hassle.<\/p>\n The trepidation Christopherson described\u2014investors wondering whether they\u2019ll actually get to keep what they buy\u2014found a vivid illustration in New York just as the report landed. Days earlier, Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s administration had the city\u2019s Department of Finance publish a searchable database of every property potentially subject to New York City\u2019s new pied-\u00e0-terre tax: hundreds of thousands of names and addresses tied to non-primary residences worth $1 million or more. City Hall projects the levy could raise as much as $500 million a year, though the comptroller\u2019s office pegs the figure closer to $340 million to $380 million. <\/p>\n Critics were quick to brand the database a doxxing exercise, noting it appeared to sweep in shopping centers and modest working-class homes alongside the penthouses the tax was pitched to target. To be sure, the NAR report\u2019s timeline straddled the period before and after Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, but for the international buyers NAR surveyed\u2014and the ultrawealthy Americans already scouting Lisbon and Mexico City\u2014it reads as one more data point suggesting U.S. real estate is becoming less a safe harbor than a variable to be managed. <\/p>\n International buyers purchased 67,100 U.S. properties in the period, down 14% from 78,100 the year before, with a median purchase price of $465,000. Canada reclaimed the top spot by volume at 16% of purchases, while China \u2014 last year\u2019s dollar-volume leader \u2014 slipped to third in purchase count. Christopherson said this jumped out to him as well. <\/p>\n Florida remained the top destination overall, drawing 20% of foreign buyers, trailed by California (19%) and Texas (12%). New Jersey and Georgia rounded out the top five at 4% each \u2014 unusual entrants that Christopherson said: \u201cwe don\u2019t typically see.\u201d<\/p>\n While America\u2019s pull on foreign buyers is fading, the outbound flow of U.S. capital into foreign real estate is quietly accelerating \u2014 and NAR\u2019s own data shows it\u2019s concentrated among the ultrawealthy. About one in ten NAR respondents reported U.S. clients searching for property abroad, and those buyers are paying cash at an even higher rate than foreign buyers of American homes: 52%, compared with 48% among international buyers of U.S. property. Mexico and Portugal ranked as the top two destinations for these American buyers, with Canada in third. Christopherson summed up the attitude as: \u201cWe can get a lot more for our money in the places that we\u2019re buying.\u201d<\/p>\n This is just another datapoint in a surging theme in wealth management: ultrawealthy investors are increasingly looking outside America.<\/p>\n Darlene Patterson, Global Head of Client Solutions at Citi Wealth, told Fortune<\/em> earlier this month that she\u2019s been witnessing something she\u2019s never encountered before: \u201cThe first time ever in my career, that I hear U.S. clients wanted to book their assets outside of the U.S.\u201d Patterson framed the shift as diversification rather than flight \u2014 clients aren\u2019t necessarily expatriating, she said, but are pursuing \u201coptionality\u201d through additional residencies or golden visas in Italy, Portugal, Jersey in the Channel Islands, Australia and New Zealand, citing \u201cpolicy risk\u201d and a desire for a \u201cstable, consistent political environment\u201d.<\/p>\n The scale is substantial: Citi Wealth\u2019s \u201cWealth Beyond Borders\u201d report projects $3.06 trillion shifting into hubs like Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and the UAE between 2025 and 2029. <\/p>\n A separate UBS Global Family Office survey found 60% of family offices planned major asset-allocation changes in the coming year \u2014 roughly double the historical norm \u2014 with nearly 30% cutting or considering cutting dollar-denominated holdings amid fears of an AI bubble, tariffs and a weakening dollar. Notably, American family offices themselves actually increased home-country allocation from 86% to 88%, reinforcing Patterson\u2019s diversification framing over one of outright flight.<\/p>\n Nuri Katz has spent 34 years moving the world\u2019s ultrarich between countries, living through the fall of the Soviet Union in Moscow and later guiding wealthy Chinese clients into Canada. Talking to Fortune<\/em> in June, he likened the number of ultrawealthy Americans looking to move abroad to the way his Chinese clients used to seek optionality, often moving from Hong Kong to Canada. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen that before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A survey of 1,733 Americans earning over $200,000, commissioned by Katz\u2019s firm Apex Capital Partners, found 61% would consider leaving the U.S. within five years, and nearly 63% had considered diversifying assets outside the country, with cost of living and taxes (68%) outranking politics (54%) as the top driver. \u201cThat\u2019s a blessing for my company \u2014 but a problem for the U.S.,\u201d Katz said. He also pushed back against a simple partisan narrative, noting anxiety now cuts both ways: \u201cPeople on the left are afraid of Trump\u2026 The people on the right who are supporters of Trump are afraid of a reaction to Trump being a stark move to the left\u201d \u2014 a framing that echoes Christopherson\u2019s insistence that policy uncertainty, not partisanship alone, is driving hesitation on both sides of the buying equation.<\/p>\n Katz\u2019s most pointed material concerns the dollar itself. \u201cMost entrepreneurs and most wealthy people are very concentrated in U.S. dollar assets\u2026 they are starting to understand that they need to diversify,\u201d he said, warning the dollar \u201cisn\u2019t going to be the reserve currency forever, and it might end sooner than later.\u201d Katz added that he happened to live in Moscow in the early 1990s, and he\u2019s seen seemingly crazy economic outcomes turn true before.<\/p>\n NAR\u2019s data shows Portugal as a top-two destination for Americans buying property abroad, its highest ranking yet, but both Christopherson and Katz noted that Portugal has actually shuttered its residential real-estate golden-visa pathway due to local backlash.<\/p>\n Katz\u2019s survey showed 42% of prospective movers still favor Europe, versus 18% for Canada and 16% for the Caribbean, but he pointed to the Caribbean and an emerging Argentina program as the next frontier for wealthy exits. Christopherson, for his part, attributed Portugal\u2019s continued rise less to hard policy incentives and more to momentum: \u201cIt also shows kind of, for lack of a better word, hype\u2026 people may have friends or family that have also moved there because it\u2019s so popular.\u201d<\/p>\n None of the three frame these developments as capital flight in the dramatic sense; Patterson calls it \u201coptionality,\u201d Christopherson calls it hedging against \u201cchanging relations,\u201d and even Katz \u2014 who profits directly from facilitating departures \u2014 says most clients aren\u2019t leaving so much as insuring themselves against a dollar and debt trajectory he considers unsustainable. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: not America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Foreign #buyers #Zohran #Mamdanis #cue #fleeing #American #real #estate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Foreign buyers purchased just … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1207,787,1856,1858,1851,1857,1853,637,1855,1852,736,62,81,1854,738],"class_list":["post-1022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-american","tag-buyers","tag-cue","tag-estate","tag-europe-real-estate","tag-fleeing","tag-foreign","tag-housing","tag-mamdanis","tag-national-association-of-realtors","tag-new-york-city","tag-real","tag-wealth","tag-zohran","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"yoast_head":"\nMoney is flowing the other way<\/h2>\n
Citi: \u201cThe first time ever in my career\u201d<\/h2>\n
Nuri Katz: \u201cI\u2019ve never seen that before\u201d<\/h2>\n
Portugal calling?<\/h2>\n