Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) chairman, Brian Wilson, has appeared before the Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s annual conference and admitted that FIRB’s ability to track foreign real estate transactions is “sorely limited” due to fundamental lack of data. From The AFR:
“There are about 11 million residential dwellings in Australia, and about 600,000 property transfers every year. It is inevitable some of those properties will be exchanged contrary to the law, but our ability to first discover and then prosecute these cases is sorely limited”…
“At the moment the FIRB and Treasury can only investigate the cases that come before us. What is needed is central depository of automated data to aid detection”…
“This is not a straightforward process but I am confident this will get a place on the Council of Australian Governments agenda”…
Good thing, then, that one of the central recommendations coming out of the Kelly O’Dwyer parliamentary inquiry into foreign investment in Australian real estate was the establishment of a national register/database of land title transfers that records the citizenship and residency status of all purchasers of Australian real estate, along with an alert system for the expiry of temporary visas to ensure homes are divested.
Having personally attended two auctions over the weekend, both of which sold for crazy sums to Chinese buyers that could not speak English (there were translators present), the parliament needs to get off its backside, endorse the recommendations from the O’Dwyer review ASAP, and give FIRB the resources that it needs to properly police foreign investment.
