The United States has gone to the polls and Barack Obama has been re-elected as President, but what does this mean for the growing number of property buyers from overseas and investor from Southeast Asia who are searching for properties stateside?
One of the most popular real estate news websites featured the headline “Don’t count on the election to boost housing” yesterday, and the great majority of the industry shares that view, feeling that in the short term little is likely to change in the housing markets in the United States, regardless of the results of the Presidential election.
The most recent housing data released by the US government paints a reasonably encouraging picture, given that the sales of new homes had reached a two-year high as of two months ago, in September. Foreclosures had also fallen in 62% of the cities in the United States during this year’s third quarter.
According to polling conducted by US television stations and the Associated Press, however, housing issues were actually pretty low on the agenda for American voters on Tuesday, with unemployment and rising prices understandably being the main priority for the great majority of people.
What many property investors from overseas want to know is whether property prices in the United States have hit the bottom in general. This is, however, not a question that has an easy answer. In many places prices have been going up for more than 12 months now, while others may actually have further to fall.
Some form of tax for overseas property investors would probably win a lot of support at home and may actually form a serious part of future property and housing prices policies, particularly when the market really begins to take off.
