Real Estate

  AFP Chinese nationals became the largest foreign buyers of US homes last year as they pour billions into American real estate, seeking safe offshore assets, according to a new study Sunday. A huge surge in Chinese buying of both residential and commercial real estate last year took their five-year investment total to more than $110 billion, according to the ...

  Bloomberg U.K. house prices rebounded in May after an investor rush to beat a new tax introduced last month left behind a shortage of homes for sale, according to Rightmove. Asking prices increased 0.4 percent to an average 308,151 pounds ($442,000), the property website operator said on Monday. Prices for properties traditionally sought by first-time buyers surged 6.2 percent. ...

  Bloomberg Singapore developers sold 12 percent less homes in April, as tighter mortgage curbs cooled demand in Asia’s second-most expensive housing market. Developers sold 745 units last month, compared with 843 in March, according to data released Monday by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Singapore home prices have dropped for 10 quarters, posting the longest losing streak in almost two ...

  Bloomberg Hotels in sun-drenched Miami are getting burned by a pullback in Brazilian travel and a building boom that has added thousands of rooms to the market. Nightly room costs are dropping. Greater Miami’s revenue per available room — a key measure of rates and occupancies known as revpar — has fallen each month this year, and in April ...

  AP The global luxury housing market lost some of its sheen last year as financial markets became unsettled and many wealthy buyers began to look for less expensive homes. “The return of realism,” is how Dan Conn, chief executive of Christie’s International Real Estate, described the high-end market that stretches from San Francisco to Singapore. Sales in a sector ...

  Bloomberg Most business travellers are at the mercy of their employer’s travel policies when it comes to where to stay. But once you get to your hotel, you’ll need to impress a different power broker to make your visit as comfortable as you can: the front-desk agent. With a few keyboard taps, these often-forgotten employees can control whether you ...

  Bloomberg Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is offering home and factory owners at least €13 billion ($14.8 billion) in loans and subsidies over the next four years to reduce the carbon emitted from their properties. The money, earmarked in the mid-term federal budget plan, will be disbursed to property owners who sign up to programs to cut power and heat ...

  Bloomberg British Columbia took over as Canada’s fastest growing economy last year on the back of its red-hot real estate market, while Alberta fell to last place. Gross domestic product in the westernmost province grew 3 percent in 2015, the fastest since 2006, led by a 5 percent gain in real estate-related services. It marks the first time — ...

  Bloomberg Hong Kong’s economy unexpectedly contracted in the first quarter as falling retail sales and a weakening property market weigh on the city. Gross domestic product fell 0.4 percent in the three months through March from the previous quarter, the government said in a statement Friday, compared with the median estimate for 0.1 percent growth in a Bloomberg News ...

  Babylon, New York / AP Matt Price and his wife, Carla, are gambling that the devastation inflicted by Superstorm Sandy will be their key to the American dream of home ownership. The couple was among the successful bidders at an auction on Wednesday that sold off the last of more than 400 flood-damaged houses that were purchased by New York ...