Hong Kong, mainland Chinese buyers are eyeing Australian property again, fast-tracking home ownership for their children
- Buyers from mainland China and Hong Kong are the single largest group of buyers in Australian property over the past 10 years
- Chinese parents are helping finance purchases to fast track home ownership for children studying and working down under
Hong Kong and mainland Chinese buyers are snapping up property in Australia in a big way again, spending cash accumulated during the past two years to give their children a helping hand in home ownership. More are expected as international travels rebound, agents said.
Plus Agency, which specialises in investors from Hong Kong and mainland China, has sold 10 homes to buyers from Hong Kong over the recent Christmas and New Year holidays, an unusually prolific outcome for a quiet period, its Sydney-based general manager Peter Li said.
“Normally, I’m on holiday at this time of the year, but I’m at the office now at 8pm processing paperwork for these transactions,” he said in a phone interview. “They used to come during the Lunar New Year, but now they come whenever the kids have time off from studies or work.”
Buyers from mainland China and Hong Kong are the largest single group of investors in residential and commercial assets there, having acquired almost A$150 billion (US$101 billion) worth of them over the past 10 years, official statistics showed. They amounted to 21 per cent of all purchases by foreign investors.
Those purchases fell to A$7.7 billion in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic from an average of AS$16 billion in each of the preceding three years, based on data published by the Foreign Investment Review Board.