photo -Librado Romero/The New York Times
Dominique Benz of São Paulo and her husband are combining two apartments with adjoining terraces at the Caledonia in Chelsea.
DOMINIQUE BENZ and her husband are looking forward to hosting a Brazilian barbecue on their downtown Manhattan deck sometime later this year.
Their ambitions for the affair won’t be constrained by space. Last year, the São Paulo couple bought two adjoining apartments at the Caledonia in Chelsea. They plan to combine them, creating a 2,800-square-foot deck — one of the largest private outdoor spaces downtown, brokers said.
They won't have any trouble finding fellow Brazilians to invite.
Already, 8 of the 181 condo units in their building have been bought by fellow countrymen, part of a Brazilian buying spree in New York that shows no sign of slowing.
“For many, Manhattan is their dream town,” said Marcos Cohen, a Brazilian broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman who said he had closed more than 15 deals over the past two years for Brazilians paying from $5 million to more than $15 million for Manhattan apartments. For Ms. Benz’s husband, a native of Rio de Janeiro who works at a São Paulo investment fund, buying a New York apartment was a passion project.
“Having an apartment in New York was a dream of my husband since he was a little boy,” said Ms. Benz, 35. “It is his gift at the end of working so hard to be able to buy it.”
With three children, the couple were willing to pay more than market value for the second of their two apartments in order to create one of the larger spaces in the building, said their broker, Fredrik Eklund of Prudential Douglas Elliman. They paid a combined $4.1 million for the apartments, with 2,133 square feet of interior space in all.
Ms. Benz said she and her husband hope that their children will someday use the apartment for internships or to work in the city. For now, she is happy to have a place to take them a few months out of the year where they can visit Chelsea Piers and ride bicycles without the fear of kidnappings many Brazilians feel back home.
Many of the Brazilian buyers in New York are professionals in their 30s and 40s, often tied to commodities or the finance sector, which has made many Brazilians rich from a flurry of I.P.O.’s in recent years.
Brazilians favor addresses along Central Park on the Upper East Side or in Midtown near Lincoln Center, where many have season tickets, brokers say. Many also look downtown at full-service buildings with concierge services.
After they close on an apartment, Brazilians often bring in their own architects and interior designers. Fernanda Marques, a São Paulo-based architect who is well known in Brazil, is currently doing two projects for Brazilians in New York and one in Miami.
Brazilians are also scooping up hundreds of units in high-end developments in Miami. At the W South Beach Hotel & Residences, about one-fifth of the buyers since 2010 have been Brazilians; they have purchased 31 units totaling nearly $50 million, said David Edelstein, a co-owner of the project. At Paramount Bay, about one-third of the buyers over the last six months have been Brazilian, said Anthony Burns, a senior vice president at iStar Residential, which co-owns the development.
Alan Araujo, a broker in Miami with Worldwide Development Services, said he sold 12 units in the Epic development to a single Brazilian client who works in the oil industry. He bought an additional 17 in another building, Infinity, about a month later. His total spent on Miami property last year: about $20 million.
“Brazilians have been waiting like 100 years for this opportunity,” Mr. Araujo said. “They are in invasion mode.”
It has become cheaper, these days, for Brazilians to buy apartments in Miami than in parts of Rio de Janeiro. Apartment prices there are soaring ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the 2016 Rio Olympics. From April to October of last year, per-square-meter prices rose by more than 20 percent in Rio’s wealthier areas, according to Ibope Inteligencia, a Brazilian research company.
“Even New York can be seen as a bargain compared to Rio,” Mr. Cohen said.
Just a few years ago it wasn’t this way. In the 1980s and 1990s waves of economic crises held Brazil’s currency down against the dollar. Inflation surged over 1,000 percent a year, and there was little middle class to speak of.
American brokers and lawyers are so eager to do real estate deals with Brazilians that they are making more frequent trips to Brazil and stepping up their marketing efforts in select society publications there.
Mr. Araujo said he made eight trips to Brazil last year, visiting five cities, trying to drum up new clients for Miami properties. Last March, Ms. Sassoun participated in a seminar in Sao Paulo, held by a law firm there, counseling high-wealth Brazilians on how to purchase property in New York and London. The advice included how to structure limited liability companies to shield buyers’ identities in property records. Some 130 people attended, with Brazilians calling in from all over the country, she said. The law firm plans another seminar next month.
Mr. Cohen, the broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, came to New York in 1987 after living through dictatorship and economic crises, seeing little future for himself there. After selling electronics he decided to get his broker’s license and has been selling real estate for the past 17 years.
With so many Brazilian tourists and part-time residents in Miami and New York, getaways can feel like homecomings. Ms. Sassoun said she was buying shoes in Bergdorf-Goodman last year and heard familiar accents. “I closed my eyes and thought I was in Brazil again,” she said.
For Jeisa Chiminazzo, a 26-year-old Brazilian model from a town of 3,000 people who bought a two-bedroom TriBeCa loft in 2009 for $1.65 million, the Brazilian invasion has at least one downside.
“If you want to gossip a little bit you can’t gossip in Portuguese anymore,” she said, “because you will have a Brazilian bump into you.”
photo:Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Jeisa Chiminazzo, a 26-year-old model, in the TriBeCa loft she bought for $1.65 million in 2009.adaped from The NYTimes
