Tina Ford, an Australian public servant, said she could hardly believe it when her three-bedroom apartment sold this month for A$1 million ($877,000) at an auction in which all 16 registered bidders were ethnic Chinese.
“I’m over the moon, I’m gobsmacked,” said Ford, 53, adding that she “would have been ecstatic with A$940,000” and didn’t expect to double what she had paid 14 years ago for her third-floor unit with a balcony 11 kilometers (7 miles) from downtown Sydney in the suburb of Chatswood. “I suspect that overseas investment, Chinese or otherwise, is certainly pushing prices up, but from a vendor’s perspective, I’m ecstatic.”
Such buying by locally resident Chinese and those from mainland China is inflating housing bubbles in and around Sydney, where prices in some suburbs have surged as much as 27 percent in the past year. That’s almost three times faster than the overall market.
Many of the neighborhoods with the biggest price gains “are areas that are popular with Chinese buyers,” said Andrew Wilson, senior economist at real estate data firm Australian Property Monitors. “Some of these suburbs are seeing price growth that we haven’t seen in Sydney since the early 2000s.”
The proportion of foreigners purchasing new homes in Australia more than doubled to 12.5 percent in the three months to September, from 5 percent throughout most of 2011, according to a survey of more than 300 property professionals by National Australia Bank Ltd.
