[frumper]

I think you're misreading that 42%. "Foreign buyers purchased 98,600 properties" compared with "Overall in the U.S., existing-home sales totaled 6.12 million in 2021".

The 42% number you're citing is the percentage of foreign buyers living abroad out of all foreign buyers. So 100k/6.1M or 1.6% of homes in the US were bought by foreign buyers, and of that 1.6% we see that 42% of those live abroad.

That is quantity of homes, if you'd like to look at dollar values of those purchases, it is also given as "International buyers accounted for 2.6% of the $2.3 trillion in existing-home sales during that time period."