> 42% of US existing home purchases were from foreign investors

Maybe I misunderstood you, but that article says out of house purchases by foreigners, 42% were by foreign buyers living abroad, and the other 58% were by foreign buyers living in the US.

US citizens buying property _vastly_ outweigh foreign buyers, in both numbers and dollar amounts.

I have to find the article, but my understanding is 15% of all US residential real estate is bought by foreign buyers, and then combined with the 25% that's bought by investment firms, a total of around 40% of the US housing marking is off the table.... Should be pretty easy to find the articles.

EDIT: it should be noted, that foreign investment was down the last couple years do to covid, though.

> my understanding is 15% of all US residential real estate is bought by foreign buyers

It’s not. If an article says that, it’s using such an absurd methodology that renders it useless.

The number likely hovers around 2-3% depending on how you define foreign investor.

There’s no QA around these types of articles and every incentive to just come up with the biggest number possible to try and rile people up. Often these are press reports from people with vested interests in real estate.

I think you're misreading that 42%. "Foreign buyers purchased 98,600 properties" compared with "Overall in the U.S., existing-home sales totaled 6.12 million in 2021".

The 42% number you're citing is the percentage of foreign buyers living abroad out of all foreign buyers. So 100k/6.1M or 1.6% of homes in the US were bought by foreign buyers, and of that 1.6% we see that 42% of those live abroad.

That is quantity of homes, if you'd like to look at dollar values of those purchases, it is also given as "International buyers accounted for 2.6% of the $2.3 trillion in existing-home sales during that time period."

That’s not what your reference is saying. It’s saying 42% purchases * by foreign buyers * are from investors who live outside the USA. Not existing home purchases.