Insider says 80pc buy-up by Chinese

Labour housing spokesman Phil Twyford.

Mainland Chinese money snapped up at least 80 per cent of residential sales in parts of Auckland in March but nearer 90 per cent in May, a whistleblower within the industry says.

Commenting on Labour housing spokesman Phil Twyford's data showing 39.5 per cent of Auckland sales from one agency between February and April were to those of Chinese ethnicity, the insider said the situation was much more serious than Mr Twyford suspected.

The numbers should be more than doubled due to the weight of capital coming out of Mainland China, the whistleblower said.

One big Auckland real estate agency, where many salespeople are of Chinese ethnicity, was selling almost every single property throughout many suburban areas to people living in China, the insider said.

In some cases, those buyers had a New Zealand connection "but it's one group disenfranchising the other. It's really taken off in the last 18 months. I've been studying the figures since October. The Kiwis, South Africans and British have dropped out of the market because they just can't compete with the Chinese.

"The people living in China buy the places the Kiwis are trying to get, then those places are rented out the next day," the insider said, fearing for the job they perform but revealing their full identity to the NZ Herald.

That showed the person is in an important position in the property sector, with extensive access to information unavailable to the public revealing who the buyers really are.

"We're becoming tenants in our own country. It's utterly outrageous."

In some cases, a single Chinese resident was spending up to $15 million on Auckland properties and the higher the bidding at auctions went, the happier they were.

Peter Thompson, Barfoot & Thompson chief, acknowledged there were many Chinese buyers in Auckland but has disagreed with Labour's analysis.

"We know there's been a large portion of Asians buying property but there's no way to tell if they're one of three categories: NZ born, foreign-born NZ citizens or foreign-born foreign citizens. If you asked me about Asian non-residents, I'd probably say between 5 and 8 per cent," Mr Thompson said.NZME