How Foreign Buyers Are Different (Part 1)

What to take into consideration while marketing and selling real estate to foreign buyers?

For sure, you know all the strong and weak qualities of your property that you offer for sale, from the point of view of a local buyer.

How about from another point of view – of the foreign buyers? It can go both ways: Your property can be more attractive to the foreign buyers (of what country or countries?) than to the locals, or the other way around – the foreigners might refuse to buy it based on their habits, cultural beliefs and preferences.

Let’s say the Chinese buyers prefer Feng Shui perfect homes. Is it yours by any chance? Then you might be in a good position to get a somewhat higher price from a Chinese buyer than from a local one who does not care about Feng Shui at all.

Once the author was interviewed by the independent British portal for realtors and developers Global Edge on the topic of the Russian buyers’ preferences when they acquire international properties. It’s for members only on this site.

But My Top 10 Tips for Selling to Russians had been re-posted on many other websites, including Inman: http://www.inman.com/2008/09/15/selling-russian-buyers-10-tips-real-estate-agents/

As you can see, some of the requests from Russian buyers are quite common and some are a bit specific, but really rather easy to fulfil if you know about them, right?

The same will be with your potential buyers from any other country and culture.

Several years ago it was so common to see headlines in the realtor’s magazines and real estate sections of the business newspapers like “The Russians Are Coming with Cash”, later the new hot wave appeared “The Chinese Are Coming with Cash”.

Now the Chinese are considered the fastest growing foreign group buying the U.S. properties. They are cash buyers most of the time. The Chinese are also very active buying real estate in Canada, Australia and Western European countries.

In the next post we will quote what real estate specialists say about the Chinese buyers’ real estate preferences and cultural differences that you should think about while working with this particular crowd of the foreign buyers.

Happy blog reading,
Olga Kellen,
The Amazon Author
International Marketing Consultant and English-Russian Translator

Copyright © 2016 by Olga Kellen
All Rights Reserved

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