Where have foreign buyers been active?

Overseas buyers are a fixture of the landscape of real estate in Australia. In fact, this is most likely true all over the world as globalisation takes hold and businesses and individuals become increasingly multinational.

Looking at the Aussie property market - where have overseas buyers been most active? The results of the latest Property Council Survey sheds some light on the situation.

Residential real estate

Of the businesses that took part in the Property Council Survey, the majority stated that they concluded less than 25 per cent of their business with foreign residents over the past three months. The largest proportion of the residential sector said that their dealings with foreign buyers accounted for between zero and ten per cent of their total business.

The states in which businesses were more likely to transact with overseas buyers were Victoria, NSW, the ACT and Queensland. The state with the least foreign buyer activity was the Northern Territory. A lot of houses for sale in Tasmania attracted overseas tenders, but typically firms dealt with less than ten per cent foreign buyers, while a few reported up to 50 per cent of their buyers were foreign.

Commercial real estate across the country

The proportion of transactions across the commercial property industry is very similar to the split for residential real estate, indicating that foreign buyers have generally diverse portfolios. This could also be a reflection of the propensity for these investors to buy into large-scale residential developments, which could skew the perception of the public towards foreign investors in residential real estate.

As the Standing Committee on Economics reported late last year, there are very few overseas buyers that are purchasing existing, standalone houses - and these are in very specific circumstances.

However, with property projected to be one of the primary drivers of our economy this year, it is important that all investment into commercial property, whether foreign or domestic be carefully nurtured, to ensure a vibrant and sustainable period of economic growth.

"Governments at a national and state level must urgently start putting in place the policies to facilitate further sustained growth in this critical sector," said Ken Morrison, chief executive of the Property Council.

As things stand at the moment, there are certainly places in Australia where foreign investment has occurred in residential real estate to greater degrees than it has in the commercial sector. It could be beneficial for those with businesses or property for sale in those areas to market themselves overseas through Australia's largest real estate network to achieve higher than average returns on their investments.