Sydney popular with Asian investors

Sydney has become a favourite among Asian property investors wanting to buy up office space to convert into apartments.

Asian property investors are scouring Sydney in search of offices to convert into apartments.

CBRE Australia says Sydney ranks below only New York, London and Los Angeles in terms of the top markets for Asian investors ploughing money into foreign commercial property.

BRE Head of Research, Australia, Stephen McNabb says Asian investors are particularly keen on buying Sydney office space and converting it into residential apartments.

"Some of the Asian capital that has come in has been acquiring secondary office, particularly in Sydney, for conversation to residential," he said.

"We've measured about 150,000 square metres that could come out of the market in the next two to three years, through conversation from office to residential and there's been an overweight interest in that from Asian investment."

Mr McNabb said while Australia's property markets had long been popular with international investors, the amount of money coming from Asia had grown substantially in the past two years.

"We've been getting an overweight share of global real estate investment activity," he said.

Asian investors invested more than $US16.2 billion ($A17.53 billion) into offshore commercial property markets during the first half of 2014, with $US2 billion ($A2.16 billion) finding its way to Australia and the Pacific.


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