Australia to Charge Fees On Overseas Property Buyers

• 31 December 2015
• Property Focus
• 1462 Views

After a sharp rise in property prices in Australia due to a 60 percent rise in Chinese buyers, the government plans to charge foreign property buyers fees to deter foreign buyers.

Sydney in particular has seen prices rise by as much as 14 percent in the last year and many have complained that that foreign homebuyers in general, and Chinese buyers in particular, are pricing Australians out of their own property market.

One plan is to charge A$5000 on any property below A$1m and A$10,000 on any property worth more than A$1m.

China has reportedly built 3.4 billion homes for its 1.3 billion people, and overseas property investment is coming as a result of concern about the future value of all this property. In the UK and the US alone, mainland Chinese buyers accounted for property sales worth US$22bn last year; a quarter of all foreign purchases. Overseas buyers represented 70 percent of all purchases of newly-built homes in London.

Australia is following both Singapore and Hong Kong who have placed similar taxes on property purchases to discourage large-scale Chinese purchases.