Four tips to help you sell Australian property to Chinese buyers

Today, Chinese money makes up the fastest-growing segment of the real estate market in Australia.

Darrell Irwin of Colliers International says that the investment wave is pushed by Chinese immigration and tourism. Chinese see the Gold Coast and Australia as a safe place to invest and a good place to educate their children.

Australia is the southern hemisphere’s Switzerland.

Irwin thinks this Chinese investment boom could end up being bigger than the Japanese wave of the 1980s.

There is a difference, however. As Irwin says: "The Chinese are a lot more astute than the Japanese were when it comes to the acquisition of real estate assets.”

Everyone from property developers to the Gold Coast City Council are trying to work out how to make sure some of that money finds its way into their pockets.

The council wants to create a Chinatown in Southport to serve the 200,000 tourists who fly down from China to the Gold Coast each year.

The Queensland government has put money into the project, contributing $50,000 to create a Chinatown masterplan. Several China-based investors have already invested significant amounts, according to a report published in the Sun.

Even Tom Tate, mayor of the Gold Coast, is getting in on the act. He bought his own tickets to China, Taiwan and Macau, where he met with rich Chinese investors and encouraged them to come to Australia.

It is no surprise that deep-pocketed organizations are targeting Chinese buyers. They have the resources to do so.

But what can individual vendors and agents do?

It turns out that, even with a limited budget, you can do plenty. To find out if you have the kind of property that could appeal to a buyer from China, or a Chinese -speaking buyer from Australia, read my last article.

Next, the most important thing you can do is list your property in Chinese, either on your own website, on a portal like Juwai.com or both.

With Chinese buyers, presentation matters. One reason that Chinese buy more luxury goods than every other country but Japan is that they live in a very competitive society. The brand of your watch can set you apart from the next person and demonstrate your success.

This has an impact on your property listings. I cannot put it any more simply than this: your listings must be professionally translated by humans -- not by Google Translate or any other software.

Chinese buyers want to feel like they are getting the best, so machine translations do you and your brand damage. They seem unprofessional, and the language they generate often comes across as childish, confusing and even offensive.

My second piece of advice for the property marketer hoping to sell to Chinese buyers is to host your listing on the inside of the Great Firewall of China.

There are two internets today: the global internet and the Chinese internet. China’s central government makes no secret of the fact that it is constantly sifting through web traffic to look for things it considers against the best interests of Chinese society.

When a Chinese user tries to load a web page from Australia, that page will probably be examined by the government’s automatic censors. This takes time.

Some websites are 45 times slower for within the firewall than for users outside of it. Chinese users either get frustrated and give up, or their web browser gives them a “Page can’t load” error. Neither outcome helps you sell property, nor present your brand professionally.

Third, focus on the right audience.

Lets face it, you are not going to sell a $700,000 property to someone earning the equivalent of $625 per month. Make sure your listing reaches high-net-worth Chinese and not the average Chinese.

Many wealthy Chinese expect to apply for Australian residency via the new Significant Investor Visa. Others send their children here for an expensive English-language education (about 150,000 are studying in Australia right now). These people are your audience.

The last tip I have space for in this article is to be patient. Just like you, Chinese buyers prefer to take their time researching the overall market, individual listings and real estate agencies.

The good news is, once they have all three elements in place, they can move surprisingly fast, and often make multiple purchases over a short period of time.

Andrew Taylor is the founder and CEO of sales and marketing of Juwai.com, the number-one Chinese real estate portal for property in Australia and around the world. Find out more about him at list.juwai.com.