As we bemoan the slowing down of the real estate market in parts of the country, South Koreans are investing in Real Estate in the United States at a rapid rate. The combination of looser restrictions on external investments and the perception that the United States is the safest place to invest has fueled this trend of real estate purchases by South Koreans.

In some ways it is part of a world-wide boom in cross-border investment. Low interest rates and an increasingly unrestrained flow of capital have allowed investment to funnel into seemingly lucrative real-estate markets in different parts of the world.
Although there are no data for residential real estate specifically, Korean direct investment in North America in the first three months of this year was more than $570 million, nearly half the $1.27 billion total for all of last year, according to the Bank of Korea. It includes corporate investment in stocks and bonds, commercial real estate and infrastructure.
“In the eyes of many Koreans, America is the safest place to invest,” says Ahn Sang Moh, an agent at New Star Realty & Management in New York, a Korean-American real-estate firm with clients in Korea.
A few years ago, real-estate purchases in the U.S. by Koreans would have been difficult. Seoul had long kept tight control over money leaving the country, which helped South Korea in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
“People simply had no way to take the money out of the country,” says Lim Ji Won, vice president of the economic research division at J.P. Morgan Chase Bank in Seoul. “This was one of the important reasons why South Korea recovered rapidly.” via The Sun News

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