Wealthy people from Australia are far more likely to put their money into property than their rich counterparts across the globe, according to the latest report published this week by Capgemini.
It said that high net worth investors - those who have more than $1.4 million in assets outside the family home - invest in real estate more because they feel like it gives them the very best potential for returns over a number of years.
According to the report, 30.8 per cent of all assets owned by high net worth investors are property. This is compared to a little over 21 per cent when looking at Asian investors as a whole. Australian investors are also far ahead of the global average, where some 18 per cent of stock owned by high net worth individuals is property.
Wealthy Australians think that property will give them the maximum return on investment," Dipak Sahoo, director of financial services at Capgemini Australia, says. "In the rest of Asia, real estate does not rank as highly because property prices have cooled off," he adds.
It's not hard to see why Australians have increasingly turned to property in recent years as investment assets. Double-digit annual growth in prices has meant that people putting their money into the sector have been able to get themselves impressive capital gains in just a few short years.
However, while Australian investors are big fans of investing in property, Capgemini found that they rank far lower than the rest of the world when it comes to buying other asset classes. High net worth individuals in Australia have 26.5 per cent of their money invested in shares, compared to almost 28 per cent across the world as a whole.
