Brazil's Flourishing Economy means....

....Great News for Manhattan's Real Estate Market.


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.




Nor will they 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. The city is already teeming with Brazilian tourists, and many of them, flush with cash from a booming economy back home, are snapping up their own pieces of Manhattan.



While Russians like Dmitry Rybolovlev, the buyer of an $88 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West, boast in press releases about their trophy properties, Brazilians have quietly become steady clients for higher-end brokers in New York and Miami.



When I was living in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro the past five years, well-to-do locals talked incessantly about New York as the ultimate status symbol. Walk into a trendy restaurant in either city and the words “Nova Iorque” seem to be spoken more slowly and loudly than any other (just in case, hopefully, somebody is eavesdropping). Even with soaring fares for flights from the Brazilian cities to the Big Apple, everyone, it seemed, was either going or coming from New York.



“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.”



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 were looking to the future, hoping that their children could 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, Mr. Eklund said.



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, helping to prop up a moribund market wracked by the 2008 financial crisis, brokers and developers there say.



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, whose lender had previously foreclosed on the project, 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.”