China ranks as Australia’s top foreign investor in real estate

China ranks as Australia’s top foreign investor when it comes to real estate, manufacturing, and mineral exploration and development, according to business intelligence consultants, Basis Point.

According to their latest insights, there have been more than 25,000 Australian residential properties purchased by overseas Chinese over the past three years.

Basis Point found real estate investment from China during 2013 to 2014 accounted for $12.4 billion in investments, doubling the second ranked US that had $6.1 billion invested. This was followed by China’s investment into mineral exploration and development reaching $5.7 billion, and manufacturing at $3.3 billion.

The insights also found that Australia is ranked second after the US as the destination of Chinese investment flow.

Basis Point noted as a comparison that self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) own 31,000 investment properties in Australia and have a circa $5.9 billion in ‘unlisted shares’.

“Australian has the fourth largest pension pool in the world. Uniquely, a third of this pension pool is self-managed by 550,000 high net worth entities,” their insights said.

“We estimate there are 1500 SMSFs with more than $10 million in assets under management (AUM) each, and a further 8000 with between $5 million and $10 million AUM each.”