Referred, Paid in Cash, Often Lost: The Foreign Buyer in the Data

The foreign buyer of a U.S. home usually arrives through people, not ads, and often pays cash, and agents are losing more of them than ever. In NAR’s 2025 survey, a record 69% of agents with international clients had one who decided not to buy or could not.

The market itself is shrinking. Foreign buyers bought 67,100 existing homes in the United States between April 2025 and March 2026, worth $45.3 billion, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR, July 29, 2026). The count fell 14% in a year and is the second lowest since NAR began tracking in 2009. Almost half of those buyers paid all cash, 48% against 28% of all existing-home buyers, and 44% lived outside the country.

When those buyers walk away, the same two reasons have led for three straight reports: nothing suitable, and the cost. Foreign deals die at a few predictable points. The agent who raises them in the first call stands a better chance of keeping the deal, and the referrals it would have produced.

The buyer from abroad carries the dollars

The 2026 totals hide a split. Foreign buyers living in the United States, recent immigrants and visa holders, bought 37,600 homes for $21.8 billion. Buyers living abroad bought 29,500 homes for $23.5 billion (NAR, 2026). The smaller group spent more. On NAR’s own totals, that is roughly $800,000 per home bought from abroad, against roughly $580,000 for foreign buyers already living here.

Florida concentrates that buyer. It drew 20% of all foreign purchases in the 2026 report, first among states, ahead of California (19%) and Texas (12%). Florida Realtors runs its own survey on a different calendar. Set beside the national survey for the nearest period, the difference is stark.

The state counted about 16,400 international purchases worth $10.4 billion in that period. Inside it, the market narrows again. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro took 45% of Florida’s international purchases, and 64% of the buyers there came from Latin America and the Caribbean. Statewide, Canada led at 18%, then Colombia (10%), Brazil (7%), Argentina (6%) and the United Kingdom (5%) (Florida Realtors, 2025).

A Florida agent who serves foreign buyers is, in practice, serving a handful of countries, a handful of metros and, mostly, one way of paying.

Seven leads in ten come from people

NAR asked agents where their foreign buyers came from. Referrals from previous clients produced 26% of leads, personal contacts 23%, former clients coming back 12%, and business contacts 11% (6% in the United States, 5% abroad). Together, 72%. Organic search brought 13%. Paid online ads brought 2%, the same as yard signs (NAR, 2025).

Florida tilts the same way. Personal contacts led at 31%, previous-client referrals followed at 21%, former clients at 13%. Paid ads did better in Florida than nationally, at 8%, and beat organic search at 5%. Even so, paid ads produced about one foreign lead in twelve, while relationships produced more than two in three (Florida Realtors, 2025).

Read the business-contact line twice. Contacts outside the United States produced 5% of foreign leads nationally and 2% in Florida. A buyer who lives in Bogotá or Toronto may already have a trusted adviser at home: a lawyer, an accountant, a banker, an agent. That line looks less like a ceiling than a channel few agents have built.

The foreign buyer is introduced before they are found. Spend the way the leads arrive.

Where the deals die

The share of agents with an international client who did not buy was 38% in 2022. It jumped to 64% in 2023, held there in 2024, and reached 69% in 2025, the highest NAR has recorded. That year the leading reasons were no property to be found (28%), cost (25%), financing (19%) and immigration laws (18%). Behind them, carrying costs rose sharply. Agents citing condo and maintenance fees went from 7% to 16%, the largest jump on the list, insurance from 9% to 15%, and property taxes from 9% to 14% (NAR, 2025).

The 2026 report keeps the top two and moves immigration up to third: no suitable property (33%), home prices (28%), immigration laws (19%) (NAR, July 2026).

Florida’s list reads like a stack of bills. Price led at 42%, then condo fees (33%), insurance (29%), U.S. foreign relations and the political climate (28%) and property taxes (24%). Financing barely registers, at 5%. The shortage of suitable homes, 31% a year earlier, fell to 17%, which the report links to more homes for sale than a year before (Florida Realtors, 2025).

The same report adds a detail a non-resident needs to hear early: only owners of a primary residence get Florida’s homestead exemption and its 3% annual cap on assessed value growth. The exemption alone can cut taxable value by as much as $50,000 for an owner who makes the home a permanent residence (Florida Department of Revenue). The buyer who lives abroad pays tax without it.

Now add the trip. Ninety percent of Florida’s international buyers visited the state at least once before purchasing (Florida Realtors, 2025). The price is on the listing. The buyer’s own insurance quote and the tax bill they will pay without homestead are not, and a buyer can be in the state before anyone puts them on the table.

Put the carrying costs in front of the buyer before the flight, not after it.

Write for the buyer who pays from abroad

Many agent websites are written for a mortgage shopper: rates, pre-approval, down payments. In Florida, 60% of international buyers paid all cash, and the share reached 75% among Canadians and 62% among Argentines, which the report ties to their high share of non-residents who were not eligible for a U.S. mortgage (Florida Realtors, 2025). Their questions are different, and each has a verifiable answer.

Closing from abroad. Florida lets an online notary located in the state notarize for a signer who is not in Florida, after identity checks over audio-video. If the identity-proofing databases do not hold enough information on the signer, the notary may not proceed (Florida Statutes, section 117.265). Test it with a buyer who has no U.S. history weeks before closing, not on the day.

The wire. The FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report counts $3.05 billion in reported losses to business email compromise, the scheme that uses compromised email and other communications to redirect a payment. One case it describes: people closing on a home received an email impersonating their attorneys and wired more than $449,000 to a fraudulent account. Their attorneys’ attempts to reach the recipient bank failed, and the money was put on hold only after a complaint reached the FBI (FBI IC3, 2026). A cash buyer sending one large international wire is an obvious target. Publish a call-back protocol, and agree it before any instructions go out.

The exit. When a foreign owner sells, in most cases the buyer must withhold 15% of the amount realized and send it to the IRS, with exceptions and reduced rates when the buyer will live in the home (IRS, FIRPTA). On a home bought at the 2026 foreign-buyer median of $465,000 and resold at the same price, the general 15% rate means $69,750 withheld at closing. The seller can ask for less with Form 8288-B, which the IRS says it normally acts on within 90 days of receiving all the information it needs. A buyer who hears this at purchase trusts the agent more. A seller who first hears it at resale does not.

The monthly cost. Condo fees, insurance and property taxes are three of Florida’s top five deal killers. A page that shows a real, dated monthly cost for the homes you actually sell answers the objection before anyone books a flight.

None of this is legal or tax advice. Each point needs checking with a closing attorney or tax adviser for the specific buyer.

The lost client is the next referral

Referrals from previous clients were the largest single source of foreign leads in NAR’s survey, at 26%. Nearly seven in ten agents with international clients had one who did not buy. Put the two numbers side by side and the lost client stops looking like a write-off. They trusted you enough to search, perhaps to fly, perhaps to make an offer. They know other people with the same plan.

Some losses are out of an agent’s hands. When immigration laws (19%) and the political climate (28%) rank among Florida’s top reasons, no pitch reopens the file. The agent can still send the buyer to an immigration lawyer instead of improvising an answer, and keep them on a quarterly note with prices, fees and the rules that changed.

The cross-border network also runs the other way. A quarter of Florida respondents had clients interested in buying abroad, with Spain and Colombia at the top of the list, and about a fifth of those agents could neither help nor refer them (Florida Realtors, 2025). An agent with a trusted partner in Madrid or Bogotá can make that introduction. Partners remember who sent the client.