PHOTO: THE RISE OF THE RICH INDIAN BUYER IN AUSTRALIA: LINKEDIN
Foreign property buyers are on the rise in Australia, with a new report revealing which nations are dominating the country’s real estate scene.
New data has revealed the top seven countries vying for Australia’s affluent property market, with international homeowners from one continent unexpectedly taking out the top spot.
When it comes to foreign buyers investing in the private real estate sector Down Under, commonly Chinese, Indian and Singaporean investors come to mind.
In fact, several polls conducted in the past highlight that Australians believe the Government is “allowing too much investment from China”, and buyers with an Asian background are driving up property prices.
However, research collated by global property insight platform Knight Frank has revealed that while investors from China and Singapore form part of Australia’s foreign buyers market, the country with the largest number of homebuyers purchasing Australian properties priced over $US2 million ($A3 million) is in a different continent altogether.
Chinese buyers aren’t the only foreign investors in Australia’s property market, with European investors dominating the sector. Picture: Julian Andrews
According to The Wealth Report 2023, the UK has the highest number of residents who own a multimillion dollar property in Australia, followed by the US.
While the report doesn’t specify the exact number of residents who have invested in the Australian property market from these two countries, market data from realestate.com.au shows search interest for Australian properties on its site has increased by 30 per cent collectively.
Nadine Goldfoot, managing partner at immigration legal group Fragomen in the UK, told Knight Frank the Covid-19 pandemic was a leading factor for Europeans who decided to relocate to Australia.
“The number of people who were suddenly able to do their existing work in a new country expanded rapidly,” she said.
“The ‘digital nomad’ boom has brought many more people into the ambit of global mobility – and countries have responded by finding new ways to attract them.”
Knight Frank’s Alasdair Pritchard also said that volatility and unpredictability in the UK and Europe’s property market drove people there to invest overseas.
“Wealthy individuals living in unstable regions have always sought a ‘Plan B’ – homes in the US, Australia or Europe that can enable the transition to a new life if needed,” he said.
“But rising geopolitical turmoil has drawn more buyers off the fence, and we expect that to continue through 2023.”
According to PropTrack’s 2022 Overseas Search Report wrap up, Melbourne was the most sought after spot for UK buyers, followed by Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast.
There was also particular interest in Queensland’s greater Brisbane region, which consists of the entire coastal plain and includes the local government areas of Brisbane City, Ipswich, Logan City, Moreton Bay and Redland City.
While not all these are multimillion-dollar properties, it shows less wealthy Europeans are considering relocating to Australia.
The results are almost identical for investors coming to Australia from the US, with Sydney taking out the top spot followed by Melbourne, Gold Coast, greater Brisbane and Perth.
The PropTrack data also revealed a large interest in the rental market from Europeans, with searches for rental properties incurring a year-on-year increase of 34.2 per cent.
Across the globe, a large portion of foreign buyers purchasing properties valued over $US2 million ($A3 million) in the Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and South Africa markets were from the UK.
Meanwhile Australia’s foreign buyer market is also composed of residents from Spain, Canada and Hong Kong, with these three nations rounding out the Knight Frank’s buying patterns list for Australia.
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