The Brooklyn waterfront is chockablock with new condominium towers and construction sites, but one new project stands out. The Oosten.

Filling an entire city block, it's the first large building erected by a Chinese company in America, without a local partner. And when it opens in 2016, the 216 unit, 7-story Oosten (the name means “East” in Dutch) will include some distinctively Chinese features, like kitchen ranges which vent outside of the building, the better for cooking with a wok. 

The developer is Xinyuan, a publicly-traded company that has built 200,000 units, covering nearly 67 million square feet - almost all of it in China.

Joel Rothstein, an attorney who specializes in deals with China, said Oosten exemplifies a bigger trend: Chinese companies eager to invest large reserves of cash in cities like New York, London, and Paris. The Chinese government expects overseas investment to hit $1.25 trillion over the next decade.

“That means there’s this whole group of new competitors and also potential purchasers,” Rothstein said.

For many Chinese individuals and companies, overseas real estate is viewed as a safe and reliable way to protect their wealth.

“All of them are looking at it,” said Wenzhou Xie, a Hong Kong-based mining executive who recently bought a one-bedroom in the Oosten. "At a dinner or some kind of party, it’s one of the topics that people bring up these days.” 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story reported there will be 363 units when Oosten opens.