The Aussies are the latest in a growing group of overseas investment fund managers to snatch up properties in New York City, but the focus is far from the Manhattan trophy sites favored by Chinese and Singaporean investors. It’s Bushwick.
Alan Dixon, an Australian who oversees a fund for investors and retirees in the land down under, has picked up 71 properties in the trendy section of Brooklyn over the last year, the New York Times reported. Over the past two years, he has purchased more than 538 homes, townhouses and brownstones in Jersey City, Queens and Brooklyn.
Dixon’s firm, the Canberra-based Dixon Advisory, eyed falling home prices in 2008 and 2009 with interest, deciding to pick up distressed New York-area homes at discounted rates.
The plan moving forward, Dixon told the Times, is to draw a steady income from property rents. As the fund continues to invest in, renovate and rent out homes, he said he anticipates returns of around 5 percent per year — though that could climb as high as 18 percent annually as property values and rents continue to rise.
As new developments increasingly spring up to support the booming rental demand in North Brooklyn, Dixon told the Times that he has moved deeper into the borough to Pick Up Rundown Brownstones On Macdonough Street in Stuyvesant Heights. [NYT] — Julie Strickland