venezuelans flock to buy miami When politics grow heated in Latin America, home purchasers from the Panama

Canal to Tierra del Fuego flock to Miami looking for a safe place to park their assets. Lately, Venezuelans in particular have been coming to the city in throngs. Since the Miami Association of Realtors started to track sales to foreign buyers in 2006, Venezuelans have bought more Miami property than Brazilians, Argentinians or residents of any other nation on the planet. Related : Buy or hire? 10 major towns The buying commenced in earnest when Hugo Chavez began running the country in 1998. While the Socialist president was thought of as a hero among the working-class, many well off Venezuelans considered him a tyrant. The concerns of unrest surrounding his October 2012 reelection triggered another infusion of Venezuelan cash into the Miami home market. Local property agents joked at the time that Chavez should have been named Miami's "Salesman of the Year," according to Matthew Martinez, a local real-estate financier and principal of Beacon Hill Property Group. After Chavez died in March of the current year, the following election that put his inheritor, Nicolas Maduro, in office also stirred up fears -- and more home purchasing in Miami. Left-of-center politicians elected in Bolivia and other South American countries have encouraged well off subjects of those states to look for a protected haven in Florida also. And, speculators from Brazil and Argentina, where the economies are booming, are also putting their excess money in safe Florida real-estate. Related : 10 enormous, booming cities As a result, Miami has become known generally as a "global gateway," very similar to Manhattan and San Francisco, that attracts deep-pocketed speculators from all across the globe, recounted Neisen Kasdin, an estate development lawyer and former mayor of the city of Miami Beach. The in-flow of buyers, combined with the business recovery in the U.S, has created a dramatic turn-about in Miami's housing market. Sales of single-family homes in Miami climbed 10.3% in the first 3 months of 2013 compared with 12 months earlier and prices jumped 23%, in the opinion of the Florida Association of Realtors. About 45% of single-family home sales and 77% of apartment sales were made in all cash, reflecting the heavy foreign presence. More than Ninety percent of sales to foreigners in Miami are made in readies. "Two years ago, Miami was the poster child for troubled property in the United States," announced Jonathan Miller, of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraiser and consultant. "It has now morphed into a luxury brand." All but Six hundred of the 23,000 bubble-era apartments that once languished on the Miami market have been sold, according to the Miami Association of Realtors. "That old inventory is essentially gone," related Kasdin. Related : Fastest-growing boomtowns During the 1st week of May, five new apartment projects in downtown Miami launched their preconstruction sales campaigns. Among them was the boutique condo building Le Parc at Brickell,

where units range all the way from 622-square-foot studios beginning at $280,000 to 1,566square-foot, 3 bedrooms for $699,000. The units have accessibility to a rooftop pool and jacuzzi and outdoor kitchen and feature high ceilings and imported tile floors. "People who want to retire and play a round of golf, that's not Miami," said Alan Ojeda, a local developer and creator of Rilea Group who's building a 44-story apartment in downtown Miami. "The town is stuffed with youth, with life, with music. The major difference now, is that the South americans are not just parking their assets here, they're parking their families as well."