It’s pretty striking.
Hong Kong, Vancouver and Sydney are some of the world’s most unaffordable housing markets, according to recent analysis by the OECD. They’ve also been attracting significant inflows of capital from Chinese homebuyers. In Vancouver, politicians and locals have been grumbling about Chinese buyers making housing unaffordable. In Hong Kong, money flooding in from mainland China is making it tough to even track down graveyard space, let alone increasingly tiny apartments. Down in Sydney, the story is largely the same(paywall).
The Chinese housing rush for foreign property is really just part of an important shift in the global economy. After decades investors channelling capital into China to take advantage of blistering growth rates, money is now flowing out of the Asian giant—largely because Chinese nationals are looking for better growth abroad than the limited investment opportunities available at home. That doesn’t exactly bode well for Chinese policymakers trying to boost the mainland’s rapidly slowing growth.
