[bleriot]

No, at least in the US. The Realtors have lobbied very hard to make sure that the real estate industry doesn’t have the same reporting requirements that banking does. So a lot of dirty money has made it into the US real estate system. The government finally started looking into it a few years ago. “By 2017, 30 percent of cash purchases of high-end real estate by LLCs in New York, Miami, LA, San Francisco, San Diego and San Antonio were involving suspicious buyers, according to FinCEN.”

[stephen_g]

I believe that it’s even worse here in Australia. We’re actually on a Transparency International list of countries with insufficient controls because we have basically no reporting for real estate, whereas banks, brokers for financial products etc. do. It’s reportedly very common for people to fly in (mostly from Asia, just given where we are located), choose a property and buy it in cash, and be back out of the country in two days or so. A lot of them don’t even bother renting it out - just hold for a few years empty and then sell it later.

The party in power doesn’t seem to care - they have a lot of property themselves (I think the average is 2 per parliamentarian, but one National party MP has 35) so have a vested interest in keeping money flowing in to inflate prices. Being the conservatives, it’s also good for their base - lots of the older/wealthy...