Sotheby’s agent Tonya Li has been working with Chinese clients in Austin for almost a decade. A new Texas law banning certain foreign buyers from owning real estate has dealt her business a serious blow.
“I lost pretty much 50 percent of my work due to this,” Li said.
Aside from citizens and lawful permanent residents, people and companies from countries designated to be a “threat” to the U.S. are forbidden from buying real estate in Texas by Senate Bill 17, which took effect Sept. 1. The law specifically names China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as threats to national security, but any country so designated by the governor of Texas or the Director of National Intelligence would fall under the law as well.
The law has chilled foreign purchases that it doesn’t outlaw, Li said.
Li gets a lot of business from parents of college students, especially the University of Texas, where Chinese students are the largest group of international enrollees.
“Parents are buying the properties as future assets for their children who actually go to school in the United States,” Li said. “None of my clients are close to national security.”
Most on-market residential purchases by foreign buyers are detached single-family homes, and half of foreign buyers intend to use their property as their primary residence, according to Texas Realtors.
Although the law permits lawful residents and citizens from China to buy land, it’s shocked the submarket of Chinese buyers in general, said Li, who formerly worked as a manager at a development company in China and has been with Sotheby’s since 2021.
“To a lot of them, it is a sign that tells them that the Texas government does not like foreign investors,” Li said. “They’re panicking.”
Many Chinese owners have been selling property since the law was passed..
“They are worried about — what if, two years later, there is going to be a new law coming out?” Li said. “I’ve been telling them, there’s no such thing just yet.”
CRE brokers also reported that Chinese clients grew wary of investing ahead of the law’s effective date.
China was the top country in the United States for foreign purchasers between April 2024 and March 2025, with Chinese buyers making up 15 percent of the foreign buyer market and accounting for $13.7 billion of value. Almost a third of foreign buyers in Texas during that period were from Mexico, but China tied with Canada for second place, with each country accounting for 8 percent of all foreign buyers this year, according to Texas Realtors.
Chinese investors also own more agricultural property in Texas than the other countries named in the bill, according to the USDA. As of 2023, the most recent year of available data, 35 parcels over 150,000 acres were owned by Chinese people or companies; Iranian entities owned two parcels totaling 200 acres. Neither North Korean nor Russian entities have reported any holdings to the USDA.
SB 17 is only the latest Texas legislation stimulated by concerns over Chinese-owned farmland.
Bills to limit land ownership for residents or organizations of China and its allies gained momentum after 2020 with reports on Sun Guangxin, a Chinese businessman who owns about 140,000 acres of land near Laughlin Air Force Base in Val Verde County, in South Texas.
Guangxin planned to build a wind farm that would take up about 15,000 acres of his holdings. In response, Texas passed a law called the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, intended to block businesses associated with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran from accessing the Texas electricity grid and other “critical infrastructure.”
Real estate attorney Dallas Barrington has led efforts to stop Guangxin’s development. Barrington represented local landowners in a lawsuit against the agency that manages Texas’ power grid, ERCOT, after it allowed Guangxin’s project to proceed for a time. Meanwhile, Guangxin’s energy subsidiary, GH America, is suing ERCOT in federal court for eventually enforcing the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, claiming it’s unconstitutional.
Guangxin is selling his holdings — which account for almost all of the agricultural land recorded under Chinese ownership by the USDA — suggesting that he isn’t optimistic about the future of his business in Texas.
“He’s got all of his stuff up for sale currently, every damn bit of it. And everybody I’ve talked to says he wants out. And, God bless, we all need to help him get out,” Barrington said.
The agent selling the biggest of his properties, an 88,000-acre ranch, declined to comment.
Barrington considers the national security benefits of SB 17 worth whatever its economic cost may be, adding that “it’s not a NIMBY bill.”
However, the law could be difficult to enforce, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center.
Some countries, including China, monitor and restrict foreign ownership, but American deed records have limited information.
In Texas, county deed registries record private contracts, which don’t show owners’ country of origin or immigration status. Indirect ownership by LLCs or other entities, which can register an address far from the headquarters of their parent company, further obscures the national origin of property ownership.
“Deed documents are registered with counties, but counties don’t control property titles. They merely register the documents that evidence property title,” TRERC research data scientist Gerald Klassen told a Texas House committee last year.
As a result, Texas has no systematic method of determining the nationality of property owners, Klassen said.
SB 17 threatens rigorous penalties for offenders. Illegitimate purchases are to be sold, and the purchaser will only get the proceeds left over after the state recoups the cost of enforcing the law. Individuals who violate the law could be charged with a state jail felony.
However, since the state doesn’t record the national origin of property owners, the law tasks the attorney general with finding and investigating illegal purchases.
The Office of the Attorney General did not respond for comment, and it hasn’t publicly said whether it is creating a process to initiate these investigations.
About 78,000 foreign buyers purchased residential property in the United States between April 2024 and March 2025, according to the National Association of Realtors. Texas accounted for 10 percent of those buyers, ranking third behind California, which netted 15 percent of foreign buyers, and Florida, where 21 percent of foreign purchases took place.
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