A new wave of buyers from China is injecting billions of dollars into the US residential real-estate market.

Chinese investors spent $12.3 billion on US real estate over the 12 months ending March 31, according to the latest data released by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

Over the past year, foreigners made $68.2 billion worth of real estate purchases in the US, 18 percent of which were Chinese, according to the NAR.

The median price of homes purchased by Chinese was $425,000, higher than all foreign buyers' median of $276,000.

Some 70 percent of the Chinese buyers used cash to pay for their homes in the US, according to a report on CNN on Monday.

An official with the Asian Real Estate Association of America (AREAA) said she didn't see any increase in the number of Chinese buyers who chose mortgages, due to the strict examination process at US banks. "I have seen more and more Chinese house buyers come with cash," said Huang Jiaying.

Joan Brothers, president of New York-based Manhattan Global Properties, said 50 percent of her clients are international buyers, many of them Chinese.

In previous years, the Chinese buyers were more like "lookers" than "buyers" and there was always a lot of "talking", she said. "They understood that there was value in purchasing real estate, but did not always want to commit.

"Recently they have begun to follow through and make more purchases, and their preferred payment method is cash," she said, adding that Chinese buyers have always been a "smart and savvy crowd", who mostly purchase US property for three reasons: to have another asset out of China, because they have a child going to school in the US, or for business.

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