While purchases in China's domestic real estate market remain under tight restrictions, Chinese investors are snapping up property in the United States. They spent more than 12 billion US dollars buying real estate in the US last year, making Chinese the second-largest group of foreign property buyers in the US market.

The America's largest real estate trade association, the National Association of Realtors, says that China accounted for 12 percent of the total investment volume in the US property market last year,just behind Canada, the largest foreign investor. It says that figure was only 5 percent five years ago.

A house in a first-tier city in the US might cost $400,000, but that amount of money could only buy a one-bedroom apartment in Shanghai. Other US policies are encouraging the trend.

Investors now can get permanent residence in the US as long as they can prove they have put at least 500-thousand US dollars into commercial property projects and have created at least 10 job opportunities in the past five years.

US government data show that while the figure for Chinese citizens investing in the US was only 35 percent of the 2007 total, the figure is now 80 percent Chinese.

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