"Good on someone for trying to throw more light on an issue which I have highlighted in the past with a recommendation that we adopt Australia's rules of banning sales of existing houses to foreigners," Mr Alexander wrote in his latest newsletter of the New Zealand Herald's revelations, based on Labour Party information, that showed people of Chinese descent accounted for 39.5% of the almost 4000 Auckland transactions between February and April this year.
Yet Census 2013 data showed ethnic Chinese who are New Zealand residents or citizens account for only 9% of Auckland's population.
"We should as soon as possible adopt Australia's rules restricting foreign buying of anything other than new housing unless resident for 12 months," Mr Alexander wrote.
Labour housing spokesman Phil Twyford, who released the data on Saturday, said: "It's staggering evidence that strongly suggests there's a significant offshore chinese presence in the Auckland real estate market."
But Mr Alexander has called for more information on the topic.
"I do not fault Labour's housing spokesman Phil Twyford for releasing the data. But as with my own efforts to estimate offshore buying last year and in 2013 the data simply do not allow us yet to truly know what proportion of our housing stock is being sold to people who will never live here - be they Chinese, Albanian or whatever," he said of the BNZ-REINZ survey.
However, he warned that requiring foreigners to build houses was not the absolute solution.
"Adopting Australia's rules as they stand won't be the panacea many are hoping for. In Australia's case people have been able to get around the restrictions quite easily. The regime is now being enforced more rigorously, but that does not necessarily alter what is being seen as a huge problem - something which people in Hong Kong have been seeing more and more of in recent years."
Mr Alexander queried the data.
"The real estate agency data released this week suffer a huge flaw in that one cannot identify whether the person with the Chinese name is in fact located offshore having no intention of living in New Zealand. Their family could have been in New Zealand since the Otago gold rush days of the 1860s. They might have migrated here in the wave from the late-1980s when we changed our migration rules to specifically reduce emphasis on English heritage and open the door instead to people based on measures of merit, regardless of where they were coming from," Alexander wrote.
Mr Twyford questioned why there are 22,000 empty houses in the Auckland region and Mr Alexander also raised that issue.
"Many Chinese who buy properties never, or rarely, occupy them. They sit empty. This applies even to newly built apartments sold to Chinese buyers. Chinese simply want an asset away from any control by the CCP," Mr Alexander said.
Yesterday, Britain's The Guardian published an article headlined China's rich seek shelter from stock market storm in foreign property and that cited Australia, Britain and Canada as bracing for a surge of interest after China's stock market issues.
Labour data dismissed
Housing minister Nick Smith has dismissed Labour's housing data, but said the Government's newly introduced requirement for all house buyers to have an IRD number and a New Zealand bank account from October would give far more accurate information on the extent of overseas investment in Auckland housing.
Meanwhile, the Green Party today distanced itself from Labour's comments by saying that rampant property investment, not ethnicity, was driving demand for Auckland houses.
Co-leader Metiria Turei agreed with Labour's policy that non-resident foreign buyers should be blocked from the New Zealand housing market. "But if parties are serious about dampening the demand for Auckland property, they need to deal to tax incentives that are encouraging locals to invest in property too," she said.
