The housing market is so inflated that the international community warns of a bubble ready to burst and locals fret that soaring prices have pushed the dream of home ownership forever out of reach.

Some weary house hunters have turned wary as reports circulate about an influx of wealthy foreign buyers, particularly from China, buying up the housing stock.

This isn’t Vancouver. Or Toronto. Or anywhere in Canada.

This is the scene in Sydney and cities across Australia where, similar to Canada, low interest rates have sparked a years-long rush into the market amid cries of overvaluation and deteriorating affordability.

Outrage from a public keenly aware of the allure of Australia’s stable economy for their Pacific Rim neighbours spurred the government to clamp down on foreign investment in the real estate market. In 2010, the Australians reinstated an old policy that largely restricts foreigners to investing in new developments only.

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Data suggests those rules have helped channel foreign investment into new, large-scale developments, increasing Australia’s overall housing supply and potentially easing upward pressure on prices of existing homes. Or at least that’s the hope.

Still, the spectre of foreign competition figures into the national conversation about home affordability, even as statistics from the Real Estate Institute of Australia suggest the proportion of foreign investment in Australia’s overall housing stock is relatively small.

That’s the key difference between the similar housing markets of Australia and Canada — statistics.

Canada doesn’t collect the kind of data on foreign investment kept by Australia, the U.S., and a host of countries around the world.

And so, nervous market observers are left speculating about whether unprecedented levels of investment — foreign and otherwise — are driving up home prices in major cities, or if foreign buyers are playing scapegoat for a hot real estate market driven by other factors.

In the absence of hard numbers, several Canadian studies have tried, with murky results, to quantify the impact of Chinese buyers on the housing market. The studies used methods ranging from a review of foreign-sounding last names to focusing on luxury home sales to a review of homes sold by a single agency.