Prospective buyers filing through the glass doors of the grand information hall at Phoenix City are being drawn to one thing - a scale model of the vast residential development they've come to inspect.
Like everything about Phoenix City - a gated community with a population of about 150,000 on the outskirts of Guangzhou, in southern China - the model is big. So big it covers a footprint larger than many of the individual dwellings on the 650-hectare site.
Agents for the developer Country Garden have been selling homes for more than a decade as the development has taken shape on what was farmland until about 15 years ago but now is part of greater Guangzhou. 
Many of its 50,000 dwellings are high-rise units. But there are also about 7000 houses, many of them laid out in tree-lined, suburban streets, a rarity in one of China's biggest cities where the vast majority of residents live in apartments. In fact Phoenix City claims to have one-third of the houses in Guangzhou, many of which have been bought by the city's government and business elite. The most expensive is a $40 million mansion overlooking a lake, while other "Diamond Villas" are still selling for about $5 million.
Apart from size, what sets Phoenix City apart from Australian developments is in its infrastructure and facilities, all of which were built by Country Garden. Along with the network of roads, it has 10 schools, several shopping centres, a hospital, community halls, a water purification plant and a 573-bed, five-star hotel. There is a free shuttle bus for residents within the development, while about 300 buses arrive and depart from its "transportation centre" every day to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and other nearby cities. A train station is just outside its perimeter.
The residents live behind boom gates and pay a monthly levy to Country Garden for the maintenance and upkeep of their homes and neighbourhoods.
Now almost finished and with most of the homes sold, Country Garden is eager to spruik the success of Phoenix City and other "integrated developments" it has built across China and Malaysia.
Since it was founded in 1992, the company has grown to become the sixth-largest residential developer in China, with about 300 projects in the pipeline, many of the scale and type of Phoenix City. One of the largest, "Forest City" in Johor, Malaysia, is expected to house 700,000 people when finished in about 20 years.
Now the company has its sights on Australia.
"This type of development is what we are really good at," says Joe Wang, Country Garden's head of sales and marketing in Australia.
"We want to bring this concept to Australia."
At present Country Garden has one comparatively small project in the pipeline in Australia, the 830-unit Ryde Garden project in Sydney's North Ryde, its first foray outside Asia. It is also looking at several new sites in Sydney and Melbourne.
But experts say it's unlikely any new projects like Phoenix City will get the green light from local and state governments any time soon. 
"We know of Chinese developers who have come in with visions of creating these integrated communities and they've said, 'It's too hard at the moment, the planning system is too complex'," says Stephen Albin, head of the developers lobby group, the Urban Development Institute of Australia (NSW).
The high cost of land and piecemeal nature of its ownership in Sydney is also a stumbling block, as are existing developer levies for local infrastructure, all of which make these projects too expensive, he says.
Planning experts such as Professor Bill Randolph, director of the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW, say while there have been examples of large masterplanned estates in Australia, the scale of these Phoenix City-style projects and the cost and difficulty of managing them here would be significant.
"The planning system doesn't work well with gated estates, such as who pays for the roads?" he says.
"Unless it's an upscale development where those costs can be covered by reasonably wealthy residents, there are some long-term issues about who looks after that stuff."
He says there are social questions, too. 
"There already are issues in large-scale strata developments around who gets access to the private facilities...Those exclusive areas don't sit with the Australia way of doing things."
But Stephen Albin says if "we can get over some of those hurdles" they could become more attractive, particularly to cash-strapped governments.
"I think it is something that Australians will be increasingly looking at especially when you consider our public services are under pressure - hospitals, schools and child care. If we could move into that space and look at a new way of developing communities the public would have an appetite for it."
Antony Lawes travelled to Guangzhou as a guest of Country Garden