Asian property developers are being draw to Australia's second most populous city, Melbourne due to growing opportunities.

Attractions in the cosmopolitan city include booming financial services, vibrant city life, population growth, good education facilities and housing shortages.

According to Bernama, there are presently several projects in Melbourne undertaken by Asian developers.

"Overseas investors are also coming into Melbourne and prefer to purchase properties from these overseas-based property developers based on their confidence in these companies," said Sam Nathan, director of Australian-based property consulting and valuations firm Charter Keck Cramer.

SP Setia, one of Malaysia's leading property development companies, made its foray into the Australian market with its recent debut of a mixed development project in Melbourne.

The company is also developing a property project in the Central Business District and is holding a public preview of the Fultan LN project in Melbourne today at the JW Mariott Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

There has been an increasing acceptance of apartment living in Australia due to changing household demographic with an increasing number of singles and couples without children.

The Central Business District has also emerged as an attractive place to live with government initiatives to promote the city as a vibrant place.

"In 1990, Australia was generally in a bad recession and Melbourne at that period of time had a lot of older office buildings.

But now, there is a lot of development taking place with these older commercial buildings converted into residential apartments," said Nathan.

Melbourne has witnessed stronger apartment growth than any other Australian city, yet Nathan argues that there is no oversupply.

He said that Melbourne had delivered close to 60,000 new apartments since 1990 but the commencement of projects had been slow with only 45,000 apartments being released in the last 10 years.

Via Property-Report