Chinese, Koreans key home buyers
The party keeps on going over at Go Go International Realty.
Kit Li, who works at the Flushing realtor, says she has sold one home to a family named Yang and “at least three” to those named Chen. Of her clients, she says, some 99 percent are Chinese and the remaining 1 percent are Korean. Almost all are immigrants.
“They are all quite, quite rich,” Li said, paying about $1.5 million, on average, for homes in and around her company’s Queens base of operations.
Indeed, if you live in the New York metropolitan area, the chances are growing that a house sold on your block will be occupied next by people named Yang, according to a recently released survey by ATTOM Data Solutions, a company that archives and analyzes information from real estate transactions throughout the country.
The study looked at buyers’ last names on more than 2.3 million sin- gle-family home sales on deeds nationwide in 2016 and 2017 and found that Yang, an ethnically Korean name, according to Ancestry.com, was the fastest-growing name on home purchases in New York.
While home sales nationwide decreased 4 percent in 2017, the number of Yangs buying homes in the five boroughs actually increased by 79 percent, from 57 in 2016 to 102 for last year.
Mirroring the experience at Go Go International, the largest number of new home sales in the area went to people named Chen, an ethnically Chinese surname that accounted for 561 sales, up 33 percent.
Nationwide, as immigration trends accelerate, the top eight hottest homebuyer last names were of Chinese origin in 2017, with ninth and 10th place occupied by names originating from Korea and Vietnam.
This varied by metropolitan area, with Li leading the list in Dallas, Chicago and Houston, Peterson in Los Angeles and Reyes in Miami.