They're here already. The Canadians are buying little cabins in Maine, so they can go hunting, fishing and skiing. When stuff is cheap, people buy.
Here's the great thing about property--ya can't take it with ya.
Remember when those "filthy A-rabs" in their dresses and sandals, with their ten wives behind them, bought up all of New York and London a few decades back? Everyone was still pissed off about the oil embargo that had finally ended, the fifty five cent a gallon gasoline, the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit, the odd-even gas rationing, the "turn the heat down to 68 and put on a damn sweater!" exhortations. OOOOOOOH, those "Mohamedans" will convert us to "their ways" and there will be a mosque in the center of Times Square and we'll all be forced to BOW DOWN! Oh, the HORROR!!! They can buy every building in Times Square, they can't pack it up and take it to Jeddah, though, can they?
Maybe you don't remember. I do, though.
Remember when the Japanese came and bought half of Hawaii and Pebble Beach golf course in the eighties, and were all over the place purchasing real estate at absurd prices, and people were CRYING that we'd lost WW2, only four decades later? They made the mistake, many of them, of "buying high." I remember that well.
Yeah, "The End Was Near" back then, too. We got over that. We'll get over this as well. I just can't get that excited, and it's not "rose colored glasses" you see, it's OLD AGE and EXPERIENCE talking.
I've seen this shit before. If you make lousy, stupid, speculative investments, you get back what you put in.
The sky isn't falling.
A bit o'history:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE5D8143BF933A25753C1A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print"From the tone of the letters I received, I would have to say that there's an anti-Japanese feeling on this issue," said Sam Karas, chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Monterey County, who supports the membership plan.
The story is also an example of the problems Japanese companies are having in making a return on dozens of prized American golf courses, hotels and office buildings they purchased during a binge in the late 1980's, often at prices that seemed, to Americans, unbelievably high.
With the American real estate market depressed, those purchases now look less wise. And Japanese companies are also having problems at home because the real estate and stock markets there have declined.
Many real estate experts have said Mr. Isutani paid too much for the Pebble Beach Company. While Mr. Isutani is said by his representatives to have no interest in selling his new treasure, it is clear he will have a harder time realizing profits from it.