SHANGHAI — Caravans of cash-rich Chinese in Hummers and Lincoln Navigators have been weaving through American neighborhoods in recent months, looking for foreclosures and other bargain properties to buy.
With housing prices crashing in the U.S., home-buying trips to America are becoming one of the more popular tour group packages in China. New U.S. visa rules for Chinese tourists and a loosening of foreign investment policies by China have made it easier for people such as Zhao Hongjun of Beijing to go house hunting across the Pacific.
The 48-year-old owner of a media company went on a two-week road trip through the U.S. last fall, visiting scenic sites and checking out properties from Los Angeles to New York. He's been following the swoon in prices ever since, and next month he's considering joining another prospecting group that is heading for San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, three of the hardest-hit housing markets in the U.S.
Zhao's budget: $1 million.
"L.A. is not bad; a lot of Chinese live there," he said, noting that he was interested in both apartments and houses.
The tours are a new twist on an old phenomenon.
Overseas Chinese have been buying Southern California properties for years. What's different now is that they are starting to do it in large groups and quite openly.
"Before, it was kind of private, a quiet thing among friends," said Jamie Lee, a Chinese American who runs the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau office in Beijing. "Now it's full-blown. . . . It's huge." Some of these groups "are talking about going every two weeks."
Chinese home-buying missions in the U.S. are part of a broader trend of individuals and businesses in China seeking greater investment opportunities abroad. This week government and business officials from China's southern Guangdong province will arrive in Los Angeles to create a regional chamber office.
Certainly, a wave of Chinese bottom fishers won't end the housing woes in Southern California, where by some measures the median price has sunk more than 40% since the spring and summer of 2007.
But it could help rev up sales in some places, including the UC Riverside area and the San Gabriel Valley, home to large Chinese American communities and mentioned by some potential buyers as places of interest.
Ling Chow, president of the San Gabriel-based Chinese American Real Estate Professionals Assn., says brokers and agents welcome the mainland tours -- anything to shake the doldrums of the market crash.
