Melton South: 'prime real estate' for Chinese investors. Credit:Jason South And the wrinkle, which the company lawyer later hastens to iron out, is that Fitzgerald combines his promises of spectacular real estate returns with equally fantastic claims about fast-tracked immigration. He cites the example of one of his new believers, who started investing only last year. "He's now buying his third property," Fitzgerald tells the crowd, unaware of a Fairfax reporter in the audience. "His goal is to get 10 houses which will actually qualify him to get a visa for Australia, so that he can have an Australian passport." Ten JLF houses delivers a visa that leads to an Australian passport?

John Fitzgerald talks at a seminar in Kunming, China in May this year. "Some people claim that you can get PR [permanent residency] by investing in Australian property, but that's not true," says migration agent Simon Wu. International property expos in China's main cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are filling up with Australian developers and middlemen, vying for cashed-up Chinese investors. Many make misleading claims about converting Australian property into the 'PR' prize. Australia booths at a Beijing property fair, promoting the chance to buy on the Sunshine Coast. Credit:Sanghee Liu Almost all, including JLF, have teams of lawyers, immigration agents and bank lenders who play on the desire of mainland Chinese investors to plan for their kids, escape the poor air quality and diversify their assets in the face of growing economic uncertainty, especially in the property market. President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign is accelerating the search abroad.

As Australia's first home buyers worry about affordability, middling apartments in Beijing and Shanghai easily fetch prices in the millions of dollars. The falling Australian dollar and low interest rate loans have added to Chinese purchasing power. Australian property is not just causing a splash among the super-rich in Beijing: it's being spruiked to ordinary, middle-class people. John Fitzgerald, who suggests property can lead to visas. After a decade of surging prices China's central government has pulled on the brakes, desperate to ensure property bubbles deflate now rather than pop later. And so investors are re-channelling new-found wealth abroad. One Chinese-Australian property agent, who markets primarily to Chinese buyers, likes to tells his clients that the presence of Chinese buyers at auctions in Sydney or Melbourne is a sure sign that the price will go too high. "Just turn away right on the spot if there are any Chinese people," the agent tells Fairfax. "Chinese people don't care how much when buying property; if they want to buy, they will buy."

As the competition in big coastal cities become too great, and investors become more savvy, developers in Australia are taking the search for capital to China's interior, where precariously high property prices are pushing the new middle-class to look abroad. Not so long ago China's far south-west would have been an unlikely destination for suntanned developers from Queensland. But John L Fitzgerald's remarkable returns can sound more credible in a places like Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, than they do in modern cities like Sydney or Shanghai. In his Kunming seminar Fitzgerald doesn't make migration the only selling point of his investment scheme. He talks about Australia's growing population, shortages of new housing and stellar historical performance. He promises to reveal the seven secrets which, he says, have turned clients into millionaires and are set out in his "best-selling" book. Afterwards a Fairfax reporter, posing as a prospective client, approached his translator and head of China operations Zhang for advice about immigration.

"We've come up with a way to help link the migration with property investment," she said. She said clients could register a company, use it to buy a property every three months, and the banks would help them buy eight houses in just two years after investing only $800,000. "So it's just an ordinary real estate investment company, it's purpose is to buy land, build a house and rent it out," she said. "Buy land, build a house, rent it out. And after two years after your own company guarantees yourself then you'll have a PR [permanent residency]." The terminology was important, she said. "It's actually not because you're buying a house that helps with migration," she said. "It's because you have a company which is a land developer, and using the employment with the company to help migrate. It's not just buying a house and you migrate."

Registered migration agents like Wu are not convinced the JLF formula is likely to work. Indeed, Zhang's own experience since she arrived in Australia about a decade ago, as a teenage student and aspiring pro-golfer, suggests immigration is not as easy as she makes out. A posting on Zhang's Wechat account shows her profusely thanking her migration agent after receiving a Regional Employer Nomination visa, subclass 187, on April 8 this year. When Fairfax later contacted the company about the claims, from an Australian phone, it was a different story. "To say that JLF is promulgating a belief that you can get Australian citizenship by buying proprieties is an absolute fabrication," said the company's general counsel, Liam McMahon.

Not even in the deep interior of China? "It has never been promulgated by JLF staff in China." The conversation was followed by a long and threatening legal letter, after McMahon had combed through policy documents and spoken to Fitzgerald and the China team. He was satisfied that conversations like those recorded in Kunming, and set out above, never happened. "I again confirm to you that at the seminars there is no mention whatsoever of migration or links to migration and property," says the JLF letter. "In fact in John's words, 'Migration is somewhat of a nuisance and a distraction to the program we're promoting'.