Developers Stephen Ross and Jorge Perez didn’t sit around waiting for the U.S. housing market to recover from the recession. Ross, whose biggest development projects are in New York, looked into China and Abu Dhabi, one of the largest cities in the United Arab Emirates.

“I had all these people working for me, so to take advantage of their expertise we looked outside the U.S.,” Ross said at the University of Miami Real Estate Impact Conference last Friday.