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The Markets Most Coveted by International Buyers

International home buyers are taking a shine to the Sunshine State.

After analyzing online searches by international users, the real-estate search engine Trulia.com found that Florida cities rank among their preferred U.S. destinations. But while Los Angeles and New York were predictably the top relocation sites, nine Florida cities cracked the top 23 list.

As U.S. housing prices continue to drop and the dollar remains weak, international buyers have snatched up homes across the state, everywhere from Cape Coral to Naples to Kissimmee. Across the U.S., foreign home buyers spent nearly $41 billion on U.S. residential real estate from March 2010 to March of this year.

“Homes in Florida are relatively cheap because of all of the foreclosures in the state,” said Daisy Kong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based Trulia. “But it’s interesting that it’s not just places like Miami and Orlando generating interest. It’s also places like Fort Lauderdale and Cape Coral.”

Trulia looked at a year’s worth of searches on its website by international users in 14 countries, ranking each country’s top five U.S. destinations. At least one Florida city appeared in the top five searches of potential buyers from every country—except Mexico, China and India.

To be sure, Florida has long attracted foreign home buyers.

In May, the Miami Association of Realtors told the Journal that nearly 60% of all sales last year throughout the area were to buyers from foreign countries. Destinations in Florida are particularly popular for buyers from Sweden, Canada and Brazil.

Ms. Kong says Trulia had expected New York to be the top destination of choice for international buyers. “It kind of surprised us that Los Angeles came in as the most popular destination,” she said.

Trulia found that buyers in the United Kingdom are partial to California, with L.A., San Francisco and Beverly Hills among buyers’ top five destinations. The Journal reported this week that heiress Petra Ecclestone, daughter of British billionaire and Formula One racing boss Bernie Ecclestone, is in contract to buy the 57,000-square-foot Los Angeles mansion built by the late television producer Aaron Spelling.

Another surprise was the interest in the Detroit market from buyers in Australia. Detroit clocked in as the fifth most popular home destination for buyers from the land down under – trailing New York, L.A., San Francisco and Beverly Hills.

The New York Times, Brought to You–Literally–by Twitter – AllThingsD

Other attendees report hearing the same thing. But whether they were participating in a mass hallucination or Nisenholtz misspoke, here’s the Times’s official line, via spokeswoman Diane McNulty: “At its current growth rate, Twitter is, or will soon move into, the top 10 in terms of referrals to NYTimes.com.”

If that’s the case, then Twitter likely accounts for much less than 10 percent of the Times’s traffic. If you assume that Google (GOOG) is the paper’s largest external referral source and that it likely accounts for a third of the site’s traffic (these are semi-educated guesses, but I’m happy to adjust), then Twitter and other sources at the bottom of the top 10 are going to be in the low single digits.

Still! It is a lot of traffic, and a year ago it either didn’t exist or someone else was directing it to the Times. Now the trick for Twitter (and its investors ) is to figure out a way to capitalize on this phenomenon.

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