Foreign investor interest in Australia remains strong, the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) chair David Irvine suggests. There's been the unexpected cancelling of promised mortgage loans by Australian banks, plus the higher foreign stamp duty taxes, along with Chinese government capital controls making it more difficult to move money from China, suggests Carrie Law, the boss of the Chinese property portal Juwai. "We expect Chinese buying to be flat in 2019," Law thinks, reports Property Observer (4 March 2019).