CHINESE demand, which helped propel a surge in Sydney homes, has dropped as much as 15 percent from a year earlier as China’s stocks tumbled and the economy slowed, according to real estate agent McGrath Ltd.

    Buyers from Chinese mainland are turning away from Sydney and Melbourne and looking at southeastern Queensland, where dwelling values are “compelling,” John McGrath, chief executive officer of McGrath, said after the firm debuted on the Australian share market in Sydney yesterday. The firm raised A$129.6 million (US$95 million) from its initial public offering.

    Sydney and Melbourne prices are at the end of the “growth cycle,” McGrath said. After running up 47 percent in the three years to October, sending the value of an average Sydney house to about A$1 million, home prices in the city dropped 1.4 percent in November, the biggest decline in at least five years. Successful auctions also dropped to a three-year low in Australia’s most-populous city as record prices put off buyers.

    Chinese buyers “are still there, but it is probably back 10 or 15 percent from where they were a year ago,” McGrath said. “I think there is a whole combination of things there. The Chinese stock market and so forth.”

    The Shanghai Composite Index has dropped almost a third from its June high. Credit Suisse Group AG Sydney-based analysts Damien Boey and Hasan Tevfik said in a note Nov. 3 that waning confidence among Chinese buyers could dim their appetite for global property by 30 percent in 2015. (SD-Agencies)