Foreign buyers spent $45.3bn on American homes, and 48% of them skipped the lender

The headline number in the National Association of REALTORS annual international survey is a market statistic, and on its own it does not change anybody's Tuesday. The composition underneath it does.

The 2026 edition, covering April 2025 to March 2026, counts 67,100 US homes bought by foreign buyers, worth $45.3 billion, at a median purchase price of $465,000. Canada led origin at 16%, then Mexico at 14% and China at 11%. Florida took 20% of purchases, California 19% and Texas 12%.

Half of these files have no lender in them

Forty-eight per cent all cash is the number a coordinator should read first, because a file without a lender is not a normal file with one step removed. It is a different critical path.

• No loan contingency and no lender-ordered appraisal means the timeline compresses, and the deadlines that remain carry more weight because there is nothing slow left to hide behind.
• Proof of funds replaces the pre-approval as the document that has to be chased, verified and dated.
• Nobody is underwriting the buyer on your behalf. The lender's incidental checks on identity and source of funds simply are not happening.
• Closing-week wire exposure rises rather than falls, because the whole purchase price moves in one instruction, frequently across a border and a time zone.

That last point connects this survey to the fraud beat. An all-cash international purchase is the transaction profile a wire fraud attempt is built for: a large single transfer, parties who have never met, and a buyer unfamiliar with what normal American closing correspondence looks like.

The rule on the other side of the deal

The survey counts buyers. The obligation that most often catches a desk out runs the other way, when the seller is a foreign person.

Under the Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act, the buyer is in most cases the withholding agent, and the standard withholding is 15% of the amount realised. The IRS provides a residence exception: where the amount realised is $300,000 or less and the buyer acquires the property as a personal residence, no withholding is required, provided the buyer intends to reside there for at least half the days in each of the first two twelve-month periods after the transfer. A reduced rate is available in a middle band above that threshold, and a foreign seller can apply for a withholding certificate on Form 8288-B to seek reduced or no withholding.

Why this reaches the coordinator

FIRPTA is a tax matter, settled between the parties, the closing agent and the IRS. A transaction coordinator does not determine withholding and should not be asked to. What the coordinator does do is notice, early, that the question exists, and make sure it reaches the people whose job it is before the file is a week from closing.

The signals are ordinary and easy to miss when you are moving fast: a seller with a foreign mailing address, a power of attorney executed abroad, a request to wire proceeds out of the country, a seller who cannot produce a Social Security number. None of these establishes anything on its own. All of them are worth a question.

Where the concentration matters

Half of all foreign purchases landed in three states, and they are the same three states whose unlicensed-assistant rules TC Bulletin has covered separately. A coordinator working Florida, California or Texas files is more likely to meet this than the national average suggests, and is working in the states where scope-of-practice guidance is least uniform.

How to read the survey

NAR's figures come from a survey of its members, so they capture transactions REALTORS reported and are subject to the recall and response bias any practitioner survey carries. They are the best regular series available on this activity, and they are not a transaction count drawn from public records. Treat the shares as more durable than any single dollar figure.