Published on offmarket.now | February 2026
When Australians think about property search, they think Domain and realestate.com.au. But there is a parallel ecosystem of property platforms — built for Chinese and broader Asian buyers — that most Australians have never heard of. These platforms move serious money, and they're reshaping who buys Australian property and how.
At its peak, Chinese investors were the number one foreign buyers of Australian property, comprising 10-15% of new housing sales and up to 25% of off-the-plan apartments in Sydney and Melbourne. Over the past decade, Asian investors (including mainland China and Hong Kong) were approved to acquire US$135 billion of Australian real estate.
The landscape has shifted. Chinese investment dropped sharply — from $3.4 billion in approved residential purchases in 2022-23 to just $400 million in the most recent FIRB figures. Slowing Chinese economic growth, stricter capital controls, elevated Australian prices, and increased foreign buyer surcharges all contributed.
But China remains the single largest foreign source of residential property investment in Australia by value. And there are signs of a rebound: mainland Chinese enquiries surged 20% during Lunar New Year 2025.
The platforms serving these buyers are sophisticated, well-funded, and operate at scale that would surprise most Australian property professionals.
Juwai.com is the world's largest international property website for Chinese buyers. Originally focused on connecting mainland Chinese buyers with overseas property, it merged with IQI Global (Malaysia's top real estate network) in July 2019 to create Asia's biggest proptech group.
The numbers are staggering: 2.8 million+ property listings across 90 countries, 10 million monthly active users, 50,000+ property professionals globally, and US$4 trillion of property advertised annually. Juwai claims to have facilitated 17,000+ property transactions in 2020 alone.
The platform operates on a B2B model — Australian agents and developers pay to list and advertise properties to Chinese buyers. For an Australian selling agent with a prestige listing in Mosman or Toorak, Juwai provides access to a buyer pool that Domain and REA can't reach.
In 2020, Juwai launched juwai.asia to serve the broader Southeast Asian market — buyers from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. This reflects a diversification away from pure China reliance as capital controls tightened.
ACProperty is Melbourne-based and serves as Australia's leading Chinese-language property and business portal. Founded in 2012 by Ivy Xiao and Esther Yong, it offers something no other Australian portal does: distribution to 50+ international platforms in 40+ countries from a single listing.
The platform is integrated with Fang.com, China's number one real estate portal (with hundreds of millions of monthly visitors). It also supports WeChat contact integration on listings — critical for Chinese buyers who conduct most business communication through WeChat rather than email.
ACProperty covers residential, commercial, and business listings, along with Chinese-language news and community services. For agents targeting Chinese buyers, it offers cross-platform distribution as a core value proposition.
Originally a New Zealand platform, HouGarden has expanded to become the number one property portal for Asian families in Australia and New Zealand. Its key advantage: it's one of the only Australasian websites accessible in mainland China, where the Great Firewall blocks most Western websites including Domain and realestate.com.au.
HouGarden's tech stack is notably modern: automated valuation models, zoning visualisations, and AI-driven chat in 14 languages. It leverages WeChat, Xiaohongshu (known as Rednote in English), Douyin, TikTok, and Instagram for distribution — meeting Chinese buyers on the platforms they actually use.
A partnership with Homely (an Australian listing site) provides cross-listing of Australian properties, expanding HouGarden's inventory without requiring agents to list separately.
What many Australians don't know is that REA Group — the parent company of realestate.com.au — operates its own Chinese-language property portal called Myfun.com. The name translates to "buy property" in Mandarin.
Myfun lists nationally with a focus on Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Gold Coast, providing Mandarin-language listings, liaison services, and market data including median prices, rental yields, and annual growth figures. REA built this through partnerships with SouFun (now Fang Holdings) and its Hong Kong platform squarefoot.hk.
The existence of Myfun underscores how seriously Australia's largest portal takes the Chinese buyer segment — even at a time of reduced investment volumes.
The Chinese buyer segment, while reduced from its peak, remains the largest single source of foreign residential investment in Australia. Agents who list exclusively on Domain and REA are invisible to this market. Platforms like Juwai, ACProperty, and HouGarden provide access to a buyer pool that can meaningfully affect sale prices, particularly in suburbs with established Chinese-Australian communities.
The existence of parallel property platforms means that some listings — particularly in prestige and new-development segments — receive significant buyer interest that doesn't show up in Domain or REA engagement metrics. A property that appears to have low interest on Domain might be generating substantial enquiry through Juwai or ACProperty.
This also means that in competitive situations (especially for off-the-plan apartments and prestige homes), Australian buyers may be competing with offshore buyers whose property search happens entirely outside the platforms Australians use.
Chinese buyers have historically been significant participants in off-market transactions, particularly in prestige suburbs. Privacy, speed, and the ability to transact without public exposure are valued highly. Some developers and agents run parallel off-market campaigns — one for domestic buyers through traditional channels, another for Chinese buyers through Juwai and WeChat groups.
For platforms that aggregate off-market listings, this creates both an opportunity and a complexity. The opportunity: surface off-market listings to a broader buyer pool. The complexity: serving Chinese buyers requires Mandarin-language support, WeChat integration, and an understanding of cross-border transaction requirements (FIRB approval, foreign buyer surcharges, and settlement logistics).
The sharp decline in Chinese property investment in Australia appears to be bottoming out. The 20% surge in enquiries during Lunar New Year 2025, combined with easing monetary conditions in China and continued demand for education-linked property (near universities), suggests a stabilisation.
Meanwhile, Americans have overtaken Chinese as the largest foreign buyers of Australian real estate by volume — a shift that has gone largely unreported. Whether this represents a permanent realignment or a temporary blip during China's economic adjustment remains to be seen.
What's clear is that Australian property search is not a two-platform market. It's a fragmented, multilingual ecosystem where different buyer segments use fundamentally different platforms. Understanding this landscape — and where off-market listings appear across it — is essential for anyone trying to buy or sell property in Australia's major cities.
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