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

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 administration had the city’s Department of Finance publish a searchable database of every property potentially subject to New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax: hundreds of thousands of names and addresses tied to non-primary residences worth $1 million or more. City Hall projects the levy could raise as much as $500 million a year, though the comptroller’s office pegs the figure closer to $340 million to $380 million.

Critics were quick to brand the database a doxxing exercise, noting it appeared to sweep in shopping centers and modest working-class homes alongside the penthouses the tax was pitched to target. To be sure, the NAR report’s timeline straddled the period before and after Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, but for the international buyers NAR surveyed—and the ultrawealthy Americans already scouting Lisbon and Mexico City—it reads as one more data point suggesting U.S. real estate is becoming less a safe harbor than a variable to be managed.

Money is flowing the other way

International buyers purchased 67,100 U.S. properties in the period, down 14% from 78,100 the year before, with a median purchase price of $465,000. Canada reclaimed the top spot by volume at 16% of purchases, while China — last year’s dollar-volume leader — slipped to third in purchase count. Christopherson said this jumped out to him as well.

Florida remained the top destination overall, drawing 20% of foreign buyers, trailed by California (19%) and Texas (12%). New Jersey and Georgia rounded out the top five at 4% each — unusual entrants that Christopherson said: “we don’t typically see.”

While America’s pull on foreign buyers is fading, the outbound flow of U.S. capital into foreign real estate is quietly accelerating — and NAR’s own data shows it’s concentrated among the ultrawealthy. About one in ten NAR respondents reported U.S. clients searching for property abroad, and those buyers are paying cash at an even higher rate than foreign buyers of American homes: 52%, compared with 48% among international buyers of U.S. property. Mexico and Portugal ranked as the top two destinations for these American buyers, with Canada in third. Christopherson summed up the attitude as: “We can get a lot more for our money in the places that we’re buying.”

This is just another datapoint in a surging theme in wealth management: ultrawealthy investors are increasingly looking outside America.

Citi: “The first time ever in my career”

Darlene Patterson, Global Head of Client Solutions at Citi Wealth, told Fortune earlier this month that she’s been witnessing something she’s never encountered before: “The first time ever in my career, that I hear U.S. clients wanted to book their assets outside of the U.S.” Patterson framed the shift as diversification rather than flight — clients aren’t necessarily expatriating, she said, but are pursuing “optionality” through additional residencies or golden visas in Italy, Portugal, Jersey in the Channel Islands, Australia and New Zealand, citing “policy risk” and a desire for a “stable, consistent political environment”.

The scale is substantial: Citi Wealth’s “Wealth Beyond Borders” report projects $3.06 trillion shifting into hubs like Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and the UAE between 2025 and 2029.

A separate UBS Global Family Office survey found 60% of family offices planned major asset-allocation changes in the coming year — roughly double the historical norm — with nearly 30% cutting or considering cutting dollar-denominated holdings amid fears of an AI bubble, tariffs and a weakening dollar. Notably, American family offices themselves actually increased home-country allocation from 86% to 88%, reinforcing Patterson’s diversification framing over one of outright flight.

Nuri Katz: “I’ve never seen that before”

Nuri Katz has spent 34 years moving the world’s ultrarich between countries, living through the fall of the Soviet Union in Moscow and later guiding wealthy Chinese clients into Canada. Talking to Fortune in June, he likened the number of ultrawealthy Americans looking to move abroad to the way his Chinese clients used to seek optionality, often moving from Hong Kong to Canada. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said.

A survey of 1,733 Americans earning over $200,000, commissioned by Katz’s firm Apex Capital Partners, found 61% would consider leaving the U.S. within five years, and nearly 63% had considered diversifying assets outside the country, with cost of living and taxes (68%) outranking politics (54%) as the top driver. “That’s a blessing for my company — but a problem for the U.S.,” Katz said. He also pushed back against a simple partisan narrative, noting anxiety now cuts both ways: “People on the left are afraid of Trump… The people on the right who are supporters of Trump are afraid of a reaction to Trump being a stark move to the left” — a framing that echoes Christopherson’s insistence that policy uncertainty, not partisanship alone, is driving hesitation on both sides of the buying equation.

Katz’s most pointed material concerns the dollar itself. “Most entrepreneurs and most wealthy people are very concentrated in U.S. dollar assets… they are starting to understand that they need to diversify,” he said, warning the dollar “isn’t going to be the reserve currency forever, and it might end sooner than later.” Katz added that he happened to live in Moscow in the early 1990s, and he’s seen seemingly crazy economic outcomes turn true before.

Portugal calling?

NAR’s data shows Portugal as a top-two destination for Americans buying property abroad, its highest ranking yet, but both Christopherson and Katz noted that Portugal has actually shuttered its residential real-estate golden-visa pathway due to local backlash.

Katz’s survey showed 42% of prospective movers still favor Europe, versus 18% for Canada and 16% for the Caribbean, but he pointed to the Caribbean and an emerging Argentina program as the next frontier for wealthy exits. Christopherson, for his part, attributed Portugal’s continued rise less to hard policy incentives and more to momentum: “It also shows kind of, for lack of a better word, hype… people may have friends or family that have also moved there because it’s so popular.”

None of the three frame these developments as capital flight in the dramatic sense; Patterson calls it “optionality,” Christopherson calls it hedging against “changing relations,” and even Katz — who profits directly from facilitating departures — says most clients aren’t leaving so much as insuring themselves against a dollar and debt trajectory he considers unsustainable. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: not America.