They will call Australia home
April 13th 2010 22:10
The question being commonly asked these days about Australian real estate is "duoshao qian?" It means "how much?" in Mandarin and, according to a recent report in Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper, leading property agents say more than 30 per cent of their stock is bought by families from mainland China.
Scott Patterson, a director at agent Jellis Craig, said late last year that 34 per cent of his firm's sales in 2009 had been to mainland Chinese, up from 15 per cent in 2008. "Demand is so strong we've got two native speaker agents starting next week."
The boom was kickstarted by an Australian government decision in 2008 to ease foreign investment rules on property. The Chinese are said to be most interested in properties in the A$1 million to $4 million range in upmarket suburbs and near private schools.
Former plastic surgeon and financial planner Jin Shang was Jellis Craig's first Mandarin-speaking agent. "China is the world's strongest economy and Australia's major trading partner," he said. "Chinese want residential properties here because they feel comfortable in Australia's multicultural environment and they know it has one of the world's best education systems."
It's just another challenge for home-grown Australian property agents. First they learned some polite greetings in Japanese when they drove a Queensland investment boom in the 1980s and 1990s, and then they learned the same greetings in Cantonese to welcome the Hong Kong interest in the run-up to the 1997 handover.
Now they are busy adding Mandarin to their growing language skills.
image: unisa.edu.au
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