Chinese buyers pushing up home prices in Australian cities

[SYDNEY] Tina Ford, an Australian public servant, said she could hardly believe it when her three-bedroom apartment sold this month for A$1 million (S$1.1 million) at an auction in which all 16 registered bidders were ethnic Chinese.

"I'm over the moon, I'm gobsmacked," said Ms Ford, 53, adding that she "would have been ecstatic with A$940,000" and didn't expect to double what she had paid 14 years ago for her third-floor unit with a balcony 11 km from downtown Sydney in the suburb of Chatswood.

"I suspect that overseas investment, Chinese or otherwise, is certainly pushing prices up, but from a vendor's perspective, I'm ecstatic."

Such buying by locally resident Chinese and those from mainland China is inflating housing bubbles in and around Sydney, where prices in some suburbs have surged as much as 27 per cent in the past …