“It's all about the price,” said Dr. Ted Jones in a presentation on “Real Estate and the Economic Outlook for 2010” Monday afternoon.
Dozens of local Realtors gathered Monday at the Holiday Inn in Frisco to hear Jones of Stewart Title Guarantee Company speak about both the local and national real estate market, and the economy.

NEW YORK: A fall of more than 10 percent in the average apartment price in Manhattan in the third quarter from a year earlier attracted buyers who pushed up the number of sales by over 45 percent in just one quarter, industry reports showed on Friday.

Despite plummeting prices foreign property investors have not been rushing to buy up bargain real estate in the US, figures show.

Residential property prices in the US are nearing the end of a three-year slump and should rise in 2010, but the overall economy can rebound even if the housing market does not, according to economists.

The outlook is bright in the United States Sunshine State. Agents are reporting the first green shoots of recovery in the Sunshine State: continuing increases in sales volume for six months. The market peaked in the second half of 2004 and bottomed out in the second half of 2008.

The weakening U.S. dollar and declining home values are largely discouraging for Americans homeowners. For international real estate investors, however, such conditions present opportunity. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) recently released the 2008 NAR Profile of International Home Buying Activity. "NAR estimates that between 150,000 and 190,000 homes were sold to foreign nationals from May 2007 to May 2008," according to the NAR press release on the findings. "Recent foreign buyers purchased properties in every state and the District of Columbia. The most popular states where international buyers purchased homes are Florida, California and Texas. Arizona, New York, Washington and Nevada were also popular." Nearly half of the properties purchased by foreign buyers were located in the South; 25.4 percent of all property sales to foreign buyers occurred in Florida alone. (For more information on foreign investment in Florida's real estate market, please see our previous article, Europeans Set Sights on Florida.)

Foreign investors in real estate expect to spend much more in 2009 than they did in 2008, according to an annual report tracking institutional investor interest.