ON a recent Sunday morning in the sun-drenched Australian city of Brisbane, about 50 “property tourists” boarded a bus tour with a difference.

The group — all local Aussies looking to purchase their first homes — were shuttled to five new apartment projects where brochures promised they could “capitalize on international deposit defaults” and snap up properties at sharp discounts.

The homes were mostly being sold by Chinese investors unable to make settlements on their investments as China cracks down on money flowing out of the country and restrictions on Australian banks lending to foreign investors take effect, the company behind the tour said.

“Getting money out of China is very hard now. That’s a big factor for these discounts,” said Property Direct founder David Beard, who sold some two-bedroom units on the bus tour at 15-20 percent lower than list prices.

“Property sales have fallen because of that, and it has got progressively harder to get bank loans in Australia.”

The cut-price sales have sent a tremor through the once-booming Australian property market, where Chinese are the top international real estate investors and which is the most exposed globally to a slowdown in Chinese buying.

While nationwide hard data on such sales are not available, UBS estimates one in five apartment buyers in Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city, are failing to settle.

Several analysts said they expected a similar response in the larger markets of Sydney and Melbourne if house prices soften further.

Official data is already signaling a slowdown.

Housing starts, which peaked at 116,000 in 2015, are now down to around 96,000. Completions are running faster at close to 110,000, a significant portion of which is expected to come up for settlement in 2018, industry experts warned.

“There is a large amount of stock that the market has to absorb,” said Nigel Stapledon, chief advisor at property consultancy MacroPlan Dimasi. “At the very least it is going to take away the upward momentum in prices.”

Already, home values in Sydney have started to fall, down 0.7 percent in November, a third straight monthly decline.

Even so, a 74-percent rise in the city’s house prices since 2012 means many investors who paid a 10-percent deposit to buy off the plan are still well in the money, providing a strong incentive for them to settle if possible.

Chinese buyers account for nearly a quarter of all new-built purchases in Sydney and about 15 percent in Melbourne, according to a Credit Suisse analysis of government taxation records between January to June 2017.

But analysts think that proportion could fall as Chinese investors struggle to move money out of the mainland after China this year imposed a curb on “irrational overseas investment” and clamped down on individuals transferring funds internationally.(SD-Agencies)