Seattle Dethrones Manhattan in Overseas Business Actual Property Funding: RCA

• Seattle has overtaken Manhattan as a commercial real estate hotspot for overseas investors, according to a report.
• Foreign investment in Manhattan’s commercial real estate has declined nearly 80% over the past year, according to the RCA.
• This is the first time since the financial crisis in 2009 that Manhattan is no longer at the top of the list, it said.
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Manhattan is no longer the biggest hotspot for overseas investors buying commercial real estate in the US, according to a new report from Real Capital Analytics (RCA).

This is the first time that Manhattan has not been at the top of the list since the global financial crisis in 2009, it said.

The district was dethroned from Seattle after New York investments plummeted last year, according to RCA data first reported by Bloomberg.

RCA said that cross-border commercial property purchases in Manhattan had declined nearly 80% to just over $ 2 billion in the year through March 2021.

Continue reading: Manhattan rents have just hit an all-time low. But even when we are at the bottom, there is still time to get hold of a cheap apartment.

Over the same period, Seattle foreign real estate investment declined only 11% to just over $ 2.5 billion, taking it to the top, the report said.

Real estate in the area is dominated by the technology industry, which, according to CBRE, now accounts for around 42% of the area’s office space.

The city in the northwest is home to tech giants Microsoft and Amazon, while Google and Facebook develop websites there.

More than half of Seattle’s cross-border investments came from Canada, RCA said. In Manhattan, on the other hand, Asia accounted for the largest share, followed by Europe.

RCA said the dramatic decline in Manhattan real estate investment was partly due to uncertainty over the office market as more companies let their employees work remotely.

Rents in the area were also hit, with Manhattan’s median rent dropping to an all-time low of $ 2,700 per month in the first quarter of 2021. The neighborhoods of Nolita, Lower East Side, and Little Italy saw the largest price drops. This is what insider Libertina Brandt reports.

But Manhattan was still roughly $ 400 million ahead of San Francisco in terms of foreign real estate investment. San Francisco took third place in the RCA ranking. The rest of the top ten consisted of Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Boston, and San Jose.