International Prospect Research Links for May 16, 2011

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“The New Global City,” a lengthy real estate feature in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, discussed high net worth individuals (HNWI) buying luxury property around the world. According to the article,

“Some of the biggest residential real-estate buyers in many cities are emerging from halfway around the globe. In London, one report finds that 65% of buyers in the luxury market hail from abroad. According to the Miami Association of Realtors, nearly 60% of all sales last year throughout the city were to buyers from foreign countries. About half of the buyers in one new luxury condominium on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue are from overseas.”

The WSJ’s “SceneAsia” blog ran a companion piece about the demand for luxury Hong Kong properties among HNWIs from mainland China.

Luxury apartments in Paris are now more expensive than those in Manhattan, according to a recent Capital.fr interview (in French) with Thibault de Saint Vincent, president of The Barnes Group.

Saturday’s Hürriyet Daily News profiled a Turkish real estate development firm planning to put $1 billion into a complex of high-end office and and residential properties in Istanbul, which is rapidly becoming a “regional financial center.”

“The Future of Women Business Leaders in the Middle East,” a new article in Strategy+Business, discussed “a small but significant group of women who are defying expectations and making a difference in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.”

Although “worldwide the IPO market is a bright spot,” more than half of the IPOs in Russia this year “were failures,” according the Moscow News.

JingDaily.com has been running a series on the emergence of luxury markets in China’s second-tier cities. This past week, the website focused on Kunming and Hangzhou.

Canadian foundations are “rebounding” from three years of economic downturn, according to CanadianBusiness.com.