With 8,000 baby boomers expected to retire daily for the next several years in the U.S., Southwest Florida stands to benefit from a massive influx of home buyers, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors believes.
Lawrence Yun said the baby boom influx will not be just from the U.S. states, because the phenomenon was not limited to America.
“After the war, servicemen came home and started having babies,” Yun told an audience of 200 Wednesday at the annual Sarasota International Real Estate Conference.
“The same thing happened all over the world.”
Already, half of all foreigners who buy real estate in Florida are retired.
In all, foreign buyers make up about 10 percent of the state’s buyers, Yun noted, though locally that figure may be higher.
While German buyers tend to acquire property in Naples — partly because there’s a direct flight from Frankfurt to Southwest Florida International Airport outside Fort Myers — Sarasota attracts a more diverse international buyer, led by Canadians and residents from Great Britain, Yun said.
Chinese buyers may become a greater presence here, too, because that country’s economy continues to “turn out millionaires right and left,” Yun said. Economic growth there is roughly 8 to 9 percent annually, on par with America’s growth in the 1950s.
“We have seen a surge of Chinese buyers coming into the U.S., primarily on the West Coast,” Yun told the conference, which was sponsored by the Sarasota Association of Realtors’ Global Business Council. “But they will begin to see that other parts of the country are attractive.”
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