Letter from the editor: Talking about "foreign" buyers

Discussions I have with Property Observer reporters and those at other property media outlets have become increasingly concerned with the terminology around "foreign" property buyers. That is, when writing a story about buyers from other countries, how can we avoid the story coming across as unintentionally racist, and how to avoid making sweeping assumptions about different groups.

Whenever any writer is dealing with a group of people identified based on their race, there's this sudden difficulty of 'othering' this group.

Let's look at some of the phrases being thrown around. "Asian buyers", "Chinese buyers", "Foreign investors", "Overseas buyers". These are typical terms you're likely to see in any property media, including Property Observer, and it has been a while now that I have had an irritated itch about the right way to phrase this.

A number of readers and commenters have written in saying things to the effect of being concerned about "foreign buyers" taking over the country. One even pointed out that this was directly the result of having read so many articles about the phenomenon.

So who are these "foreign buyers"? Does someone from New Zealand fall into your perception of a "foreign buyer"? How about someone who has left Australia to seek residency elsewhere? How about someone who has achieved residency here, but wasn't born here?

According to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 85% of Australian residents have Australian citizenship.

With one in four Australians (2011 Census) having been born overseas - and I am on this list myself - and 43.1% of people having at least one parent born overseas, how 'foreign' someone is can be very hard to define.

This is even when running off of the dictionary definition, such as the Oxford English Dictionary which gives the word two meanings:

1) Of, from, in, or characteristic of a country or language other than one’s own

2) Strange and unfamiliar

The term "foreign" is fraught with difficulty to use and is painfully vague - we'd also hate for the second meaning to get tied up in a story. In the hope for clarity, we journalists decide to narrow this term down further.

Perhaps we're only looking at Chinese buyers - a source of fascination for many, it seems. So we refer to "significant interest from Chinese buyers".

But what exactly does this mean? Who are these Chinese buyers?

How can we define who is Chinese, and who is not? I read many auction reports noting that there were "many Chinese buyers in attendance". Does having a Chinese surname make you Chinese? Are we discussing Chinese heritage?

Do they live in Australia, but were born in China (6% of the population, 2011 Census)? Perhaps they have Chinese parents, and maybe they personally identify as Australian as they were born here, or maybe they were born in London with Chinese parents. Perhaps we're discussing those who primarily live overseas.

Let's narrow this down further then. Let's talk solely about the mainland Chinese buyers - and our style guide urges us not to refer to China as mainland China, even though it doesn't say we cannot refer to mainland Chinese buyers.

But then we have to know whether or not they have Australian citizenship. This information can be difficult to come across when looking at broad statistics, let alone for specific buyers at an auction when you may not even get access to the list of names.

Our visa system can also, for the uninitiated, be notoriously complicated. For instance, here's a breakdown from the Australia-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New South Wales website.

Regardless of who is buying, if they are citizens, or on permanent visas, then in my mind they're the same as every other property buyer and I think we'd be hard pushed to make a non-racist case that their buying habits are necessarily different from anyone else's. In fact, even though there's this thought that Chinese buyers who have permanent residency or citizenship may still have a certain way of buying, it's hard to find much proof outside of suburb-specific qualitiative research.

There are certainly different cultural norms, and we know from areas such as Cabramatta in New South Wales and Carlton in Victoria that ethnicities can concentrate together in suburbs. As someone with English heritage and English family members, I'm aware that older members of the British buyer category quite frequently dislike apartment-style living. But this by no means applies across the board, and it's not even consistent across China, or across age groups and income groups.

Even if we were able to identify every single Chinese person buying a property in Australia who does not have permanent residency or citizenship, and were privvy to that information (let's see what we can get from the Government, specifically the Foreign Investment Review Board who channel all of the applications), it's hard to know specifically what we would be gaining. The overarching numbers are important, the suburb/LGA specific data as to where different people are buying is interesting too, but do we need to go much further?

There's a lot that needs clearing up here, but the main area that needs discussion is the reason why we're talking about these buyers in the first place. Just because someone sees a lot of Chinese people at an auction, doesn't actually mean anything. Imagine if we did the same thing with English buyers, and tried to identify who they are (and therefore what their purchasing habits might be) based on their surname and their face.

We've written plenty of articles on how to attract 'Chinese' buyers and what they want in a property, but these can often be sweeping assumptions even with information garnered from a range of sources. Property Observer and, from what I can tell, other publications, do intend to keep writing stories about this area of interest, but we're going to need a better plan of attack for how we approach this.

So I'm calling on you to give us some ideas on what you think needs clearing up across the media, and how we can go about it.

Email me: jduke@propertyobserver.com.au with your thoughts.