Where a Chinese buyer can still buy a home in 2026

Chinese buyers aren’t leaving Australia. They’re being locked out of almost everywhere else faster.

Ten years ago a family in Shanghai with money to place overseas had a long list. Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Singapore, London, Los Angeles. Australia was one option among many, and it competed on price and welcome like everyone else. That was the picture most agents formed, and it was accurate then.

Here is the list in October 2026.

Rules as at October 2026. On a phone, swipe the table sideways.

Read that table the way a family in Shanghai reads it and the conclusion is obvious. Australia didn’t get friendlier. The alternatives closed. But that is only half the story, because there are two Chinese buyers in this market, and they want different things.

The first buyer is still in China, deciding where to go. Dubai, Tokyo and Singapore are open to them, and cheaper on paper. But a family doesn’t choose a country on price. They choose it on whether their children can grow up there. Japan is a monoculture; so is the Gulf. Singapore is small and expensive. Australia is multicultural, the universities are good, and the children come out speaking proper English. For a family thinking twenty years ahead, that makes Australia the stable final choice, not the cheap one. The attraction hasn’t weakened. The list of places that can compete with it has.

The shape of the market has changed, and it is worth saying plainly. Fewer buyers fly in with offshore money than in 2016. But the market didn’t shrink; it moved. The 2016 buyer became the 2026 resident, and the family still in China now follows a relative who already lives here. In Victoria, one in seven new-dwelling sales still goes to a foreign buyer. Those who come have chosen Australia for reasons that don’t move with a rate cycle, and they can only buy one thing: a new home.

That is what makes the off-the-plan market more interesting than it looks from the auction results. Every overseas family that picks Australia lands in the same place: a new apartment, a house-and-land package, a boutique development. The established market is closed to them until 2029. A project in a good school zone is not competing with Toorak for this buyer. It is competing with Tokyo and Dubai, and winning.

It also suits how this buyer behaves. The overseas families who enquire through ACproperty research for three to six months before they arrive, with parents and advisers in the loop. A rule that is clear and dated, and a fee that is published, are exactly what a family like that plans around. Chinese-language explainers already set out the full landed cost of a Melbourne apartment, fee by fee, in renminbi. Canada’s “we’re considering a new approach” cannot be modelled. Australia’s rules can. Predictable beats welcoming.

The second buyer already lives here. Buyers from China hold about 22,000 dwellings on the ATO’s foreign ownership register, more than half of all foreign-owned homes. That register only counts foreign buyers. Chinese-Australians who are citizens or permanent residents aren’t on it, and the ban doesn’t touch them. They can buy anything, and they do.

About 60 per cent of the buyers on ACproperty are already in Australia, and a good share of them are forwarding listings to family overseas who will help fund the purchase. This buyer lives in Box Hill or Chatswood, wants a house with land in a school zone, and moves quickly.

And the two buyers are not separate. Ten years of migration and study have put roughly 730,000 China-born people in Australia, and every one of them has family and friends at home. When a cousin in Glen Waverley says the school is good and the suburb is safe, that carries more weight in Shanghai than any portal. The Chinese community here is the reason the family in China chooses Australia over Tokyo, and it is the reason the enquiry arrives already half-decided. Agents see two buyers. It is one network.

What it means at the appraisal is two sentences, depending on the property. For a new build or off-the-plan: Australia is the country Chinese families still choose, and this is the only kind of home they’re allowed to buy. For an established home: fewer are coming from offshore, but the local Chinese-Australian buyer never went anywhere.

One caveat always applies: reach amplifies genuine interest, it doesn’t manufacture it. If the property suits this buyer, a school zone, a new or renovated family home, a lifestyle suburb, then being visible to them is leverage. If it doesn’t, no amount of international marketing changes that.

The map of where Chinese money can go has shrunk to a handful of countries. Australia is still on it.

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