In this article
Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →Two developments this week put foreign ownership of Australian housing back in view. On 13 July, news.com.au reported Australian Taxation Office data showing that more than 34,000 non-residents claimed net rental losses totalling $473 million in the 2024 financial year. On 16 July, Treasury announced that a review of the conditions attached to foreign investment approvals had begun on 1 July.
Neither is specific to Queensland, and neither changes what a foreign buyer may purchase. But both arrive three weeks after Parliament rewrote the negative gearing rules for Australian investors, and they raise an obvious question in a state that charges foreign buyers an extra duty: how large is foreign investment in housing, and what rules already apply to it?
The clearest measure is Treasury's own quarterly reporting, the most recent of which was published on 29 May. This article sets that beside the tax data, the federal rules as the ATO describes them and the Queensland Revenue Office's duty rates.
Treasury, Quarterly report on foreign investment, 1 January to 31 March 2026, published 29 May 2026; ATO guidance on property a foreign person can buy.
The tax data on non-resident landlords
The news.com.au report, by Nathan Mawby and republished by the Property Investment Professionals of Australia, drew on ATO figures for the 2024 financial year. Its central number is that more than 34,000 non-residents declared a net loss on rental property, and that those losses came to $473 million.
Divided out, that is an average loss of a little under $14,000 for each of those owners, on the rounded figures. The report notes an important limit: the ATO data combines residential and commercial property, so the 34,000 cannot be treated as a count of foreign-owned homes.
Related readInvestors turn to new builds and yield as 10 August deadline nearsThe report's argument is about contrast. The May Budget restricted negative gearing for Australian investors to newly built homes from 1 July 2027. Non-residents, it says, were already limited to buying new dwellings and lost the capital gains tax discount in 2012, so the Budget's changes leave their position largely as it was. PIPA's chair, Cate Bakos, told the publication that the unchanged treatment "does rub salt in the wounds" for younger Australians who hoped to invest before buying a home of their own.
The opposite concern was put by Jacob Caine, president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia, who said that restricting tax relief could discourage foreign investment that adds to housing supply.
A non-resident for tax purposes is not the same thing as a foreign person under the investment rules. An Australian citizen working overseas can be a non-resident taxpayer while owning a rental property at home. The tax data and the approval data described below therefore measure overlapping but different groups.
How many purchases are being approved
Foreign persons generally need approval before buying residential property in Australia. Treasury's quarterly report counts the approvals given. For the three months to 31 March 2026 it records 663 approved residential real estate proposals with a combined value of $1.0 billion. The ATO, which handles residential applications, had a median processing time of 15 days.
The same report gives the previous quarter and the financial year to date, from which the September quarter can be worked out.
Treasury, Quarterly report on foreign investment, 1 January to 31 March 2026. The July to September figure is calculated from the year-to-date total of 2,326 less the two later quarters.
Across the nine months, 2,326 proposals worth $3.7 billion were approved. The March quarter was the quietest of the three by number, about 23 per cent below the December quarter, although its value of $1.0 billion was slightly above the December quarter's $0.9 billion. On those rounded figures the average approved proposal in the March quarter was worth about $1.5 million.
Related readMinimum housing standards: what a Queensland rental owner must provideHalf of the March quarter approvals carried conditions: 331 were approved with conditions and 332 without.
By country of the investor, China accounted for 156 of the 663 proposals, followed by Taiwan with 76, Vietnam with 65, Hong Kong with 43 and Indonesia with 33.
For scale, the commercial side of the same report records $79.7 billion of approved investment across 311 proposals in the quarter. Residential real estate is a small part of foreign investment by value, and it is small beside the domestic market too: the ATO counted 2,335,540 individuals with an interest in a rental property in its latest taxation statistics.
What a foreign person can buy
The low numbers reflect tight rules. The ATO's guidance on the types of property a foreign person can buy, updated on 13 May, states that foreign persons are banned from purchasing established dwellings in Australia from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, with limited exceptions.
What remains open is, in the main, property that adds to the housing stock.
| Type of property | Can a foreign person apply to buy it? |
|---|---|
| New or near-new dwelling | Yes, including one not occupied for more than 12 months in total |
| Off-the-plan dwelling | Yes |
| Vacant residential land | Yes, land with no substantive permanent building |
| Established dwelling for redevelopment | Yes, as an exception |
| Established dwelling to live in or rent out | No, until 30 June 2029, outside limited exceptions |
ATO, types of property a foreign person can buy, page updated 13 May 2026. A further exception covers established dwellings bought to house workers under the Pacific labour scheme.
Temporary residents are caught by the same ban on established dwellings, the ATO says, but can still apply for approval to buy vacant land or new dwellings.
The effect is that foreign demand is directed to the same part of the market the new negative gearing rules favour for Australian investors: new builds. Off-the-plan apartments in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast are the kind of property both groups may now find themselves looking at.
The extra cost of buying in Queensland
Queensland adds its own charge. The Queensland Revenue Office levies additional foreign acquirer duty on direct and indirect acquisitions of residential land in the state by foreign persons. The rate is 8 per cent for transactions where the liability arose on or after 1 July 2024. It was 7 per cent between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2024 and 3 per cent between 1 October 2016 and 30 June 2018.
Related readNegative gearing and depreciation: how tax rules treat a rental propertyThe additional duty is paid on top of ordinary transfer duty. As a worked example only, on a new apartment bought for $800,000 the additional duty at 8 per cent would be $64,000.
The Revenue Office's page lists two forms of relief. Foreign retirees holding specified visas may be exempt on a principal residence bought on or after 1 January 2023, subject to conditions on living in the home and not disposing of it. And an administrative arrangement offers relief from both the additional duty and the land tax foreign surcharge to residential land developers. The second is directed at developers, not at individual buyers.
Treasury's review of approval conditions
Treasury's announcement of 16 July concerns the conditions attached to approvals that have already been given. The review, which began on 1 July, will look at whether those conditions still do their job, and may remove ones that are ineffective or that duplicate obligations under other laws, while updating others for newer risks. Tax conditions are being examined first.
It follows changes to the foreign investment framework announced in the 2026-27 Budget. Public consultation is expected to open in August through Treasury's consultation website. In the meantime, Treasury says, nothing changes: investors must keep complying with their existing conditions, and anyone wanting a condition varied must still apply through the Foreign Investment Portal and pay the fee. Written submissions will be taken once the consultation opens.
Treasury's notice does not single out residential property. With 331 residential approvals carrying conditions in the March quarter alone, though, any change to standard conditions would reach a good many home purchases.
What the figures leave out
Treasury's summary figures are national. The quarterly report does not publish a state breakdown of residential approvals in its headline tables, so there is no official count of how many of the 663 March quarter proposals were for Queensland property.
An approval is also not a purchase. It is permission to buy, and an approved buyer may not go on to complete. The count of approvals is best read as an upper bound on sanctioned foreign buying, not as a tally of settlements.
Finally, the tax and approval figures answer different questions. One describes people who live overseas and own Australian rental property, whatever their citizenship. The other describes foreign persons seeking to buy. Neither supports a claim about the share of Queensland homes in foreign hands. For that, the published federal figures would need a state breakdown they do not currently give.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
