China's Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development announced this week that purchases of housing by overseas organizations and individuals in the country would be capped or restricted, a move widely seen as combating speculative money from overseas that might flow into the property market.
A New York City penthouse at 15 Central Park West sold to a mystery buyer for 40 million US dollars, representing the highest-priced residential real estate in the city at a record of 10,259 US dollars a square foot.
Interest in fixed assets, strong commodities’ prices and growing prospects that global demand for food producing land will continue have generated a new rush of foreign investors to buy land in Uruguay.
Land purchases by foreign investors in poor countries and the growing use of bio-fuels are boosting pressures on agricultural farmland and helping make 500 million small farmers hungry, a U.N. envoy said this week.
Prices for the best farmland in Argentina’s breadbasket, the humid Pampa have risen on average 10% this year according to registered operations reports. This means the hectare of prime agriculture land in Argentina now costs almost the same as the average price of farmland in the state of Illinois, 14.000 US dollars.
China has raised interest rates for the first time since 2007, as it tries to rein in inflation and dampen its red-hot real estate market. The People's Bank of China said it will raise its one-year lending rate to 5.6% from 5.31% and its one-year deposit rate to 2.5% from 2.25%.
As rising food and fuel prices create incentives for large-scale land acquisitions around the world, it is more important than ever for governments and the international community to protect local land rights, according to a new World Bank study released this week.
Fears that Uruguay could be heading for a “real estate bubble” since prices in US dollars have increased more than 70% in the last five years, seem to have been neutralized by historic data and the strong appreciation of the Uruguayan currency.
Sales of real estate in Uruguay’s internationally renowned resort Punta del Este and its area of influence reached almost 1.5 billion US dollars between January first 2009 and the first half of 2010, according to the Tourist Office from the County of Maldonado.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim real estate firm paid 44 million US dollars for a town-home on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, adding to his property holdings in New York.