"Many of them want to buy because they have actual needs to live there or for their children," Liu said. "They will hold the property for quite a long period."
James Chou of Coldwell Banker George Realty in Alhambra said he was preparing for several groups from China early next year, totaling up to 200 people. His firm will provide hotels and tour buses.
Chou said the potential investors were keen to see foreclosed homes, but he warned that it would be difficult to educate them about the home-buying process in such a short time. He said they had little understanding of single-family houses, coming from a country where most people live in urban apartments.
"I don't think they know much about the market here," Chou said.
Lee, of the L.A. Convention and Visitors Bureau, has mixed feelings about these gou fang tuan, Chinese for home-buying groups. On one hand, she says, they will be staying and eating and shopping in Los Angeles, pumping dollars into the local economy.
On the other hand, Lee has been working hard in China to publicize the biggest attractions of Los Angeles: its great weather, beaches, Hollywood and theme parks.
"I'm promoting tourism to L.A., but not to go to buy cheap houses," she said. "Are we that desperate?"
Mei Xinyu is ambivalent for a different reason. As a researcher for China's Ministry of Commerce, Mei doesn't want to see a rush of Chinese buying homes in the U.S. and getting burned.
"The housing price right now in the U.S. is fairly low already, but it's hard to say how long it will remain in the valley," he said.
Chinese investors, Mei added, should be careful to study the markets before plunging into them. In some places, they could face a backlash, just as there was when the Japanese went on a shopping spree in the U.S. during the 1980s. What's more, he warned, some American cities may not bounce back at all.
"China is still in the process of urbanization. It's unlikely to turn into ghost towns," he said. "But the U.S. is different."
Yuan Lixin says his group's tour to the U.S. is meant to address precisely that concern -- to give visitors a deeper understanding of the real life of America over 14 days, before they buy into the real estate.
"What we sell is the culture, American culture," said Yuan, a planning department official at Beijing Youth, a newspaper enterprise that has organized group tours to the U.S. since late 2006.
The tours didn't start out as home-buying trips, but while driving across the continent in luxurious SUVs, people couldn't help but take notice of "For Sale" signs outside houses, including those that appeared to be empty, Yuan said.
"In many cases, members would stop the car and actively ask about the house situation," he said.
"Now because of the financial crisis, ordinary people in China also are starting to make large purchases in the U.S.," Yuan said. "In the past, people who traveled to the U.S. might carry back a large luggage with American goods. It's just that this time, what they bring back are [papers showing] hundreds of thousands of dollars of a house."
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don.lee@latimes.com
david.pierson@latimes.com
Cao Jun in The Times' Shanghai bureau contributed to this report.
