Shanghai Office Advises Australia’s IDFG on Cross-border Real Estate Investment Fund
Investors Direct Investment Management (“IDIM”), a fund management subsidiary of Australia-based Investors Direct Financial Group (“IDFG”), recently launched a cross-border real estate investment fund.
A team led by Shanghai-based senior partner Wu Chenyao and partner Qiu Pei acted as PRC legal counsel for the fund. The team worked jointly with IDIM and provided services such as design and verification of cross-border transaction structure, due diligence over critical matters, drafting transaction documents and seeking approval from and filing with relevant government agencies. The key problems the attorneys helped solve were domestic individuals and institutions’ direct investment in an offshore fund, due diligence over offshore real estate projects and participation in offshore real estate project management and risk control.
Deeply rooted in Australia’s real estate market, the fund would be used primarily to finance its parent company IDFG’s housing development projects, including low-density villas, row houses, and medium-density apartments. At a size of AU$100mln and with 3-year duration and 20%-25% of expected internal rate of return, the fund was approved as qualified investment product for migrant investors seeking Significant Investor Visa. It adopts typical Australian fund structure and boasts such advantageous features as multi-party supervision, independent audit from a third-party and fair compliance management by the trustee institution, compared with mainstream real estate investment funds in China. The fund would be based on Australia’s mature and sound housing development market and by optimizing and decentralizing investment and integrating value of the whole industry chain, the fund would provide risk-controllable, sound investment opportunities for Chinese investors.
IDFG, a financial and real estate group founded in 2001, provides one-package services in real estate investment management for investors and holds internationally accredited licenses for all the services. The real estate investment and wealth management system, invented independently by IDFG, enjoys a good reputation among Chinese in and outside China as well as westerners. IDIM, its fund management subsidiary, has a group of investment managers with expertise in the areas of international capital and Asia’s real estate industry.
