Foreign buyers seem to be following Zohran Mamdani’s cue — and fleeing American real estate

Foreign buyers purchased just $45.3 billion worth of U.S. existing homes between April 2025 and March 2026, a 19.1% plunge in dollar volume and the second-lowest transaction count since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in 2009.

The pullback comes even as a weaker U.S. dollar should have made American real estate more attractive to overseas buyers — a contradiction that mirrors what wealth advisors and immigration specialists have been describing anecdotally for months: a historic reversal in which the ultrawealthy are rapidly falling out of love with the U.S. as an investment destination.

Perhaps the most striking data point buried in the report: New York, long a fixture among the top five state destinations for international buyers, has fallen out, replaced by newer entrants New Jersey and Georgia.

Matt Christopherson, the NAR’s Director of Business and Consumer Research and author of the report, told Fortune that he was surprised. New York state is “typically in or close to the top five,” Christopherson said. “And they were pushed out this year.”

Christopherson said the wider drop-off defies the simple currency logic that normally governs foreign buying behavior. “Despite foreign buyers having stronger buying power with more favorable exchange rates, we still saw them draw back,” he said, attributing the hesitation partly to a “wait and see approach” driven by a turbulent year of trade policy shifts and state-by-state changes to property ownership laws. He agreed that it coincides with a turbulent year in foreign trade and heightened uncertainty with Donald Trump back in the White House, but declined to attribute the data to a straightforwardly political calculation.

“There might be a little bit of trepidation of these investors saying, ‘Let’s hold off and wait till it’s a little more certain that we can keep these [properties] and make these investments,” Christopherson said. He noted that the report also tracks buyers who wanted to buy and couldn’t, and the top two reasons cited were being unable to find the right property and costs. Buying in America is just kind of a hassle.

The trepidation Christopherson described—investors wondering whether they’ll actually get to keep what they buy—found a vivid illustration in New York just as the report landed. Days earlier, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s........

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