Which Platforms Work Best for Australian Property Professionals to Generate Leads?

Every agent already knows the answer to this question. The portals. What fewer agents have worked out is that a campaign can be entirely correct and still be incomplete.

Which platforms generate the most enquiries?

realestate.com.au and Domain. It isn’t close, and any honest answer has to start there.

Between them they hold the attention of Australian buyers in a way nothing else approaches. A buyer arrives on those sites with a budget, a suburb list and a Saturday planned. A vendor expects to see their property on both. An agent running a campaign without them isn’t running a campaign.

So the first two decisions about a marketing budget are already made, and nothing in the rest of this article changes that. Everything below is about what happens after those decisions, not instead of them.

If the portals cover the market, what’s missing?

The buyers who never arrive at the portals in the first place.

For most of the last twenty years this didn’t matter much, because the buyer pool for an Australian home was almost entirely a local, English-speaking one. Covering the two portals covered the market. That wasn’t laziness; it was accurate.

It’s less accurate now. China is consistently the largest single source of approved foreign investment in Australian residential real estate: in the Foreign Investment Review Board’s quarterly report for April to June 2025, China led both by number of approved residential proposals and by value. The more relevant number, though, is closer to home. The 2021 Census counted 549,618 China-born residents in Australia, and Mandarin is the most used language at home after English.

These aren’t offshore investors watching from a distance. They are permanent residents and citizens, buying established homes under exactly the same rules as anyone else. On ACproperty’s own platform, about 60 per cent of buyer traffic comes from Chinese speakers already living in Australia and about 40 per cent from overseas (ACproperty platform data, 2026).

Why don’t those buyers show up on the major portals?

Some of them do. The point is where they start.

A buyer whose first language is Chinese begins the search in Chinese — on Chinese-language platforms, inside WeChat, in family group chats where properties get forwarded and discussed. By the time they open realestate.com.au, they are often verifying a property they already have in mind rather than discovering one.

Which means an English-only listing hasn’t been rejected by that buyer. It has never been shown to them. They aren’t weighing your property against another. They are absent from the process entirely.

This is the part that makes it easy to miss. A buyer who never sees a listing doesn’t appear anywhere in your reporting. There’s no enquiry that didn’t convert, no inspection that went quiet. There is simply nothing — and nothing looks identical whether the gap exists or not.

How much difference does that actually make?

Less than the marketing around it claims, and more than the averages suggest — and the distance between those two is the whole point.

Chinese-speaking buyers are a minority of the buyer pool, they don’t dominate any suburb, and anyone promising you a flood of them is guessing. But campaigns aren’t won on the average. They’re won on the particular Saturday when the right buyer walks in, and the difference between four interested parties and five is the difference between a result and a strong result.

Call it the last ten per cent. It isn’t where the volume is. It is quite often where the outcome is — and it costs a fraction of what the first ninety per cent costs, because the audience is already there and already searching. What’s missing is only the distribution.

That’s the practical case for adding it. One subscription places a listing across Chinese-language channels and more than 50 partner portals in over 40 countries, so an agency covers that audience without opening accounts in a language it doesn’t read, and without touching the portal budget that’s doing the heavy lifting.

What does this change in a listing presentation?

More than it changes in the marketing report, and this is the part worth thinking about.

A vendor choosing between three agents is rarely choosing between three marketing plans. The portals will be on all three. The photography will be professional on all three. What separates them is whether an agent can answer the question a vendor is really asking, which is whether anything has been left out.

Being able to say that a property will be in front of local buyers, national buyers, and buyers searching in Chinese here and overseas — and show the vendor where — is a complete answer. It isn’t a promise about who will buy. It’s a demonstration that no part of the buyer pool has been left uncovered.

That is the same reason professional photography stopped being optional. Not because a photograph sells a house, but because a vendor comparing two campaigns notices which one is missing something.

The portals decide whether your listing is seen. Completeness decides whether you’re the agent who gets to list it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best platform for Australian real estate agents to generate leads?

realestate.com.au and Domain generate the most enquiries and should be the foundation of every campaign. Additional platforms are best understood as closing specific gaps rather than competing with the portals — most usefully, the gap left by buyers who search in a language other than English.

Do I need anything beyond realestate.com.au and Domain?

Not to reach the mainstream buyer pool. You need more when a gap matters — a prestige property whose buyers are international, off-the-plan stock where foreign purchasers are permitted, or a suburb with a significant Chinese-speaking community already searching in Chinese.

Are Chinese buyers a large enough audience to bother with?

They are a minority of the market, and it’s worth being straight about that. But China is consistently the largest single source of approved foreign investment in Australian residential real estate — it led both by number and by value in the FIRB quarterly report for April to June 2025 — and the 2021 Census counted 549,618 China-born residents here. Roughly 60 per cent of ACproperty’s buyer traffic is Chinese speakers already in Australia, buying under the same rules as any resident.

Can foreign buyers still purchase Australian property in 2026?

With conditions. From 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2027, foreign persons cannot purchase established dwellings. New and off-the-plan properties remain available with approval. Chinese-speaking buyers who are permanent residents or citizens are not affected by these restrictions.

How do I show a vendor that international marketing is working?

Through visibility rather than promises. A dashboard showing where a listing has been published, which portals carry it and in which countries, gives a vendor something concrete to look at. That is more useful in a listing presentation than any forecast of enquiry numbers, which nobody can honestly make.

Related reading: Which real estate platforms are best for marketing a property online? · How do top agents win listing presentations in 2026? · Best platforms for marketing Australian property to Chinese buyers, compared

Esther Yong is the founder of ACproperty.com.au, Australia’s largest Chinese property portal. She has spent 15 years connecting Australian real estate with Chinese buyers locally and internationally.