[Photo provided to China Daily]

Old houses out

Yang, who is from Hong Kong and said she speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese, said Chinese people also find the town’s big shopping mall with its luxurious shops and the area’s number of golf courses appealing, but not old houses.

“In China for the last 10 years everything is new, so when clients come here and see all the old houses they get turned off,” she said.

Yang said the Asian population in Manhasset was around 20 to 25 percent, “but now it’s really going up and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 50 percent in a few years.”

In 2014, the Asian communities throughout Nassau County accounted for 9.1 percent of the total population of 1.36 million, whereas the Asian percentage of New York state’s population of 19.7 million was 8.5 percent.

Yang also does residential real estate deals in New York City. Last year, she said she closed on eight to 10 residential listings involving Chinese clients at prices between $1 million and $2 million in the city and Roslyn.

Doug Lee, a Manhasset resident for 26 years, was born in Guangdong province, moved to Hong Kong as a child and then came to the US to attend college, getting a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in accounting from St John’s University in New York.

Lee said Asians are attracted to Manhasset because of the clean environment, good schools and an established community.

“In Great Neck, for example, there is the Great Neck Chinese Association. So when these groups come in, they do feel at home,” he said in an interview. “Many of them do come in with a lot of resources, and they create a lot of demand on the high end of the real estate market.”

The real estate agents throughout Nassau County are not the only ones who know that Chinese buyers put a premium on good schools.

Juwai.com is an international property listings service website. Simon Henry, co-founder of Juwai, told China Daily that the site is looking to make education a key part of its platform for real estate listings.

“There are four major motivations for Chinese to buy property internationally: investment, immigration, education, lifestyle,” he told China Daily in an interview.

And Yang, the Realtor in Manhasset, said that because Chinese are getting wealthier, she expects to see more of them buying houses in the suburbs. “It’s just best for their kids, she said.