MELBOURNE, Sept 26 – Real estate agency, Knight Frank, has tasked Malaysian-born Dominic Ong to capture the growing investment demand for Australian commercial property from Asia, particularly China. According to The Australian, Ong has been involved in commercial sales worth A$1 billion (A$1=RM3.10) in the past year, with many buyers of investment and development sites being wealthy individuals.
Ong told the newspaper about he can picture that when we have a property, call it a A$10 million house, when they were introduce it to their current data base of a few thousand Chinese high-net worth investors, it is going to be well-received. The Australian said Ong has been involved in A$1 billion of commercial sales in the past year, with many buyers of investment and development sites being wealthy individuals.
Ong said many of these rich investors also looked for a home in Australia, making a follow-up sale “logical”. He said that the timing was perfect because we all know that all the outflow investment from China was due to the encouragement from the Chinese government while the -policy changes came in mid-2012 and the outflow investment has since then ballooned.
He said many agents in the division were of Asian background, giving them a good idea of the culture and business etiquette. Ong spent four years in the US, where he studied finance at the University of Mississippi. He returned to Malaysia in 1992 and worked as a securities broker for nearly a decade, trading shares on Bursa Malaysia.
Ong then moved to New Zealand, and it was there that he started in the real estate sector with local group Bayleys, and then CBRE from 2008. He switched to Sydney with real estate agency CBRE in 2011, before being recruited to head the Asian division in Knight Frank.
