Foreign demand for Australian residential property has slowed in 2015 as Chinese consumers tighten their purse strings, piling pressure on a housing market already feeling the pinch of a regulatory crackdown on local investors and poor affordability.
"Chinese demand for global property could fall by 30 per cent [this year]," Credit Suisse analysts Damien Boey??? and Hasan Tevfik??? estimate in a recent research note.
And that trend looks to have extended to Australia. 
"Chinese bidders have reportedly been less active in foreign property markets [since the   August devaluation of the yuan]," the analysts say.
The key factor in reduced Chinese demand for foreign bricks and mortar is not tighter capital controls, but the less confident and wealthy Chinese consumer.
"The underlying issue is weakness in the Chinese economy," the analysts write. "Capital flight is tightening credit conditions, which, in turn, is dampening income growth, wealth and the purchasing power of Chinese residents.
"All things considered, the likelihood is that Chinese flows into the Australian property market have flattened out in 2015."
Potential home owners will cheer the prospect of less competition, particularly those wanting to buy in areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane which have proved popular with offshore investors
This spring, auction clearance rates in Sydney nudged 64 per cent, well down from 75 per cent the previous year. House price growth seems to be flagging in the major metropolitan markets and there have been several reports suggesting prices may decline next year.
It is hard to measure the impact on prices of overseas buyers, but a sharp increase in interest must have provided extra support to the booming property price cycle.
And Credit Suisse's thesis is not that Chinese buyers have disappeared completely.
They point to NAB's residential property survey, which suggests foreigners bought almost one in every six new homes in the   September quarter, and close to one in 10 of existing home sales.
However, a flattening in the number of foreign purchases comes as the housing market enters "marginal oversupply", the analysts say.
"Demand needs to rise just to keep prices steady."
Meanwhile, locals are being squeezed by tighter regulations and poor affordability.
Complicating any study of foreign demand for homes is the "distinct lack of timely and accurate data", the analysts note.
The Foreign Investment Review Board releases annual data, but with a considerable delay.
They also point to problems with the enforcement of FIRB rules and under-reporting.
That means discussion on foreign buying relies heavily on anecdotes and extrapolation from other data sources.
To come to their conclusions, Hoey and Tevfik have relied on the latter, using more up-to-date proxies: CBRE data that shows Chinese interest in Australian commercial property, and US "all-cash" home sales, which are dominated by foreign buyers and are reasonably correlated with Chinese consumer sentiment data.
The proxies combined seem a reasonable guide, as they suggest a 39 per cent increase in Chinese purchases of Australian homes in 2012, where the FIRB data shows approvals rose 42 per cent, the analysts say.
"Recently, weak consumer confidence readings are historically consistent with a decline in [US] all-cash purchases of roughly 30 per cent in the year to   December 2015."
If true, a sharp decline in Chinese interest in the property market may hurt an Australian economic recovery that has been relying on housing activity as a key engine of growth.
"The risk is that house prices flatten out or fall, making it harder for the economy to absorb the mining shock via housing and the consumer," the Credit Suisse analysts write.
"An increase in Chinese demand is required to keep the housing market in equilibrium in lieu of rising supply and falling local demand. In the absence of a pick-up in foreign demand for housing, it is likely that policymakers will need to stimulate the economy further."
The analysts believe "deep and timely RBA rate cuts might help to stabilise housing demand by counteracting the overly negative impact of macro-prudential regulation".
However, there are reasons to believe Chinese buying of property abroad will trend upwards in the long term.
The analysts point to China's growing middle-class, who have an appetite for new assets.
Combine that with a shortage of domestic investment options and ongoing capital account liberalisation, and the trend of Chinese money looking for an overseas home remains strong.