Foreign buyers purchased an average of about 100,000 existing U.S. homes a year, worth roughly $56 billion, over the five years from 2020 through 2024. That number is a five-year average, drawn from the National Association of Realtors' annual "Profile of International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate," the only national dataset that tracks foreign-buyer activity.[1] The yearly count swings widely, from a 2017 peak of 285,000 homes and $153 billion to a 2024 low of 54,000 homes and $42 billion, before rebounding 44% to 78,100 homes and $56 billion in the 2025 cycle - the first annual increase since 2017.
Foreign nationals and foreign-state-controlled entities separately hold approximately 46M acres of U.S. agricultural land, or about 3.4% of all privately-held farmland.[2] The federal framework requires disclosure of these holdings but does not prohibit any purchase. CFIUS may review individual transactions on national-security grounds; AFIDA requires post-closing paperwork from foreign owners of more than 10 agricultural acres. Neither instrument places a categorical bar on foreign ownership of American land or housing.
Twenty-eight states have moved in the absence of federal action. Their statutes vary in scope, in adversary-country lists, and in enforcement. A foreign buyer barred from a purchase in Florida or Texas can close on an equivalent property in Georgia or Alabama. The federal vacuum is the binding constraint.
The Residential Market
The five-year average (100,000 homes, $56B) smooths out a volatile series. Foreign-buyer transactions fell from 154,000 in 2020 to 54,000 in 2024, then rose 44% to 78,100 in 2025.[1] The swings reflect U.S. interest rates, currency effects, and post-pandemic travel patterns, not a structural policy change. The pre-pandemic norm was 250,000 to 285,000 homes per year.
The geographic concentration has held constant across the decline. Florida absorbs 21% of all foreign-buyer transactions. California absorbs 15%. Texas absorbs 10%. Arizona absorbs 5%. New York absorbs 4%. The metros are Miami, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Houston, Phoenix, and Orlando. These are the same metros where the median home price-to-income ratio rose from 3.5x in 1990 to 8x-18x in 2024.
The top source countries in 2024, by dollar volume, were China ($13.6B), Canada, Mexico, India, and Colombia. Chinese buyers spent more on U.S. real estate in 2024 than buyers from any other single country. The Chinese share has been the largest in 11 of the past 13 years.
What the Numbers Count and What They Miss
The NAR international-buyer count is narrower than its label suggests. NAR classifies an international buyer into one of two types.
- Type A: Non-resident foreigners. Buyers with no U.S. residence at the time of purchase. Roughly half of annual NAR foreign-buyer transactions fall here.
- Type B: Foreign-born U.S. residents in the country less than two years. Includes temporary visa holders, recent green-card holders, and recent humanitarian arrivals.
The category does not capture long-term lawful permanent residents (in the United States more than two years), naturalized citizens, or U.S.-born children of immigrants. Those buyers appear in the Census American Community Survey homeownership data, which reports approximately 26M owner-occupied U.S. homes with a foreign-born head of household in 2023.[3] The Census figure is a stock measure across all years of arrival; the NAR figure is an annual flow measure restricted to recent foreign-related purchases.
The distinction matters for policy design. A statute that bars only non-resident foreign nationals would cover roughly half the NAR-tracked annual transactions and a small fraction of total foreign-related U.S. homeownership. A statute that requires lawful permanent resident status to purchase any U.S. real property would cover both NAR categories at the time of any future transaction, while not affecting the 26M existing owner-occupied homes held by long-term residents and naturalized citizens.
The Florida and Texas state laws cut a different line: they restrict purchases by nationals of specific adversary countries (China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and others) regardless of immigration status. A Chinese national with a U.S. green card is subject to the Florida restriction; an Iranian national with a Canadian passport is not.
The Effect on American Home Prices
Foreign buyers concentrate in the metros where Americans are already priced out. The marginal effect of foreign demand is not the totality of the cost-of-living crisis - mass legal immigration, supply constraints, and zoning are larger factors - but it is one of the policy levers Congress can move directly.
The transaction profile matters as much as the volume. NAR reports that 50% of foreign-buyer 2024 transactions were all-cash, against roughly 30% for the U.S. market overall. All-cash buyers outbid mortgage-dependent first-time buyers in any market with constrained inventory. The Federal Reserve's 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances reports the median first-time U.S. homebuyer carries a loan-to-value mortgage above 90%; in a multiple-offer situation against a cash offer, the financed buyer loses by structural disadvantage. The mechanism is not unique to foreign buyers, but the foreign-buyer cohort is disproportionately all-cash.
Foreign buyers also disproportionately purchase as investment, vacation, or rental property. NAR data: 53% of foreign-buyer 2024 transactions were investment or vacation purchases, against 16% for U.S. buyers overall. An investment purchase converts an owner-occupied housing unit into rental or vacation stock, reducing the inventory available to American owner-occupier buyers. The compositional effect compounds the price effect.
National Security
The Smithfield Foods sale to Shuanghui International (now WH Group) in 2013 - $4.7B, the largest U.S. food-industry acquisition by a Chinese buyer to date - transferred ownership of the largest American pork producer and hundreds of thousands of acres of hog-operation land to Chinese control. The CFIUS review approved the transaction with mitigation conditions. The ChemChina acquisition of Syngenta in 2017 - $43B, headquartered in Switzerland - placed agricultural seed and pesticide research stations across the U.S. Midwest under Chinese-state-controlled ownership. Neither transaction could have been blocked under existing statutory authority.
The Fufeng Group acquisition of 370 acres near Grand Forks Air Force Base in 2021 became the public test case for the gap in federal authority. The Air Force objected in 2023. CFIUS initially declined jurisdiction over the agricultural transaction. The city of Grand Forks killed the project in February 2023 after the federal acquisition was already complete.[5] The 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act extended CFIUS jurisdiction to real-estate purchases near specific military installations, but the trigger remains voluntary filing or post-hoc referral. No automatic screen runs against foreign purchasers of land near U.S. military facilities.
Chinese holdings of 270,000 to 350,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land are small in absolute terms - less than 1% of foreign-owned farmland and a small fraction of a percent of all U.S. farmland. The political salience comes from the location pattern: a disproportionate share of recent Chinese-linked agricultural purchases have occurred within twenty miles of U.S. military installations or critical infrastructure. The total acreage understates the national-security exposure.
The Federal Framework
Three federal instruments apply. None prohibits a foreign purchase.
The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requires foreign owners of more than 10 acres of U.S. agricultural land to file a report with the USDA Farm Service Agency within 90 days of the transaction. Failure to report can produce a fine of up to 25% of the property's fair market value. The statute does not cap any state's foreign-owned share. It does not require approval from any federal agency before closing. It is paperwork.[3]
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, expanded by the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, reviews the national-security implications of selected transactions. CFIUS review is triggered by voluntary filing or post-hoc referral. The committee can recommend that the President block a transaction or order divestiture. In practice, the great majority of reviewed transactions close, often with mitigation agreements. CFIUS is a case-by-case national-security tool, not a categorical bar.[4]
The residential market has no analog. A Chinese citizen on a tourist visa - or with no U.S. presence at all - can wire funds to a title company in Miami or Houston, close on a $5M condominium, and own it outright. No federal agency reviews the transaction. No nationality screen runs against the buyer. The closing looks identical to a closing for an American citizen.
The State Patchwork
By the end of 2024, 28 states had enacted some form of restriction on foreign land ownership. Most target nationals of specific adversary countries - China, Iran, North Korea, Russia - rather than imposing a general restriction on all foreign owners.
Florida SB 264, signed by Ron DeSantis on May 8, 2023, prohibits most Chinese-national purchases of any real property in the state. Cuban, Venezuelan, Syrian, Russian, and Iranian nationals face additional restrictions on agricultural land and on property within 10 miles of military installations or critical infrastructure. A federal district court partially blocked the statute in February 2024 on equal-protection grounds; the Eleventh Circuit largely affirmed the injunction later that year. The law remains on the books in modified form.[5]
Texas SB 17, signed by Greg Abbott in 2023 and in force as of September 2025, bars individuals and entities tied to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia from acquiring agricultural or commercial property in the state. Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma have passed analogous statutes.
The structural limitation of the state model is that 22 states still impose no foreign-ownership restriction. A foreign buyer barred from Florida or Texas closes in Georgia or Alabama. The federal framework remains the binding constraint.
State-level foreign-ownership restrictions, May 2026
Where the states have moved without Congress
Roughly 28 states have enacted restrictions on foreign ownership of real property - mostly targeting adversary-nation nationals. Two notable incidents (the Fufeng / Grand Forks AFB case and the Smithfield / WH Group acquisition) are marked separately. Tap any marker for the statute and scope.
The Constitutional Questions
A federal foreign-property statute faces three constitutional questions. None of the three is fatal.
The first is equal protection. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments permit federal alienage classifications under a deferential standard of review when Congress acts within its constitutional authority over immigration and foreign affairs. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld federal restrictions on aliens that would be impermissible if imposed by a state. A statute that classifies by immigration status (citizen / permanent resident / temporary visa / no status) and treats foreign-state entities as a class is within that pattern.
The second is the Takings Clause. Mandatory divestiture of an existing holding is a taking only if the property is taken without just compensation. A one-year sale window that returns the proceeds to the foreign owner, less reasonable administrative costs, preserves full economic value. The statute does not condemn the asset; it regulates who may continue to hold it.
The third is treaty obligations. The United States has bilateral investment treaties and Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation treaties with about 50 countries that include national-treatment provisions for real-property investment. A federal statute would need to renegotiate, terminate, or carve out the affected countries. Both have precedent. The 1996 sanctions on Cuba (Helms-Burton) imposed property restrictions despite trade-treaty objections from European partners.
What the Statute Should Do
The recommendation is one federal statute with five provisions.
- Green-card minimum for any real-estate purchase. No person other than a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or lawful permanent resident may acquire any interest in U.S. real property - agricultural, residential, commercial, or industrial.
- Categorical ban on foreign-state entities. Foreign governments, sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises, and corporations in which a foreign government holds a controlling interest may not own U.S. real property in any category, regardless of country of origin. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund and the China Investment Corporation are treated identically.
- One-year mandatory divestment of existing foreign-owned property. Administered through a federal registry at the Treasury Department. Failure to divest within the window triggers a federal forced sale; proceeds return to the foreign owner less administrative costs.
- Federal preemption of the state-level patchwork. Inconsistent state restrictions are replaced with one uniform federal rule. State laws that supplement the federal standard in non-conflicting ways are preserved.
- Civil and criminal penalties for circumvention. Straw-buyer arrangements, shell-company structures, and other mechanisms used to acquire U.S. property on behalf of a barred foreign owner are subject to forfeiture and prosecution.
The International Norm
Most developed economies restrict foreign land ownership. The United States is unusual in not doing so.
Mexico prohibits foreign nationals from owning property within 100 kilometers of any border or 50 kilometers of any coastline - a "restricted zone" covering most of the country's desirable real estate. Thailand bars foreign nationals from owning land outright; only condominium units are permitted, capped at 49% foreign ownership per building. Switzerland's Lex Koller imposes federal restrictions on non-resident foreign property acquisition. The Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and most of South Asia restrict foreign land ownership through constitutional provisions or general statutes.
American land is the asset. American policy should determine who holds it.
Sources
- National Association of Realtors, "Profile of International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate" (2025 release) - Annual foreign-buyer counts and dollar volume, top source countries, geographic distribution; the 100,000-home figure is the 2020-2024 five-year average, the 78,100 figure is the year through March 2025
- USDA Farm Service Agency, "Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land Through December 31, 2023" - AFIDA annual report on foreign agricultural land ownership
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 5-Year Estimates, Table B25007 - Foreign-born homeownership counts
- Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA) - CFIUS jurisdiction over real-estate transactions
- Reuters, "North Dakota City Rejects Chinese Firm's Corn Mill Near Air Force Base," February 7, 2023 - Fufeng acquisition, Air Force objection, project cancellation
- The New York Times, "Chinese Company to Buy Smithfield, Producer of Pork," May 29, 2013 - Smithfield acquisition
- National Agricultural Law Center, "States' Authority to Regulate Foreign Land Ownership" - State-by-state breakdown
- Congressional Research Service, R47597, "Foreign Direct Investment in U.S. Real Estate" - Federal and state policy survey