COULD WA be in for a surge in foreign investment?
Our real estate institute has seen traffic surge on its reiwa.com site and social media channels, with 70 per cent of traffic to the website from Japanese people.
However, it was a case of mistaken identity, rather than an increase in interest in WA property or an April Fool’s Day joke.
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READ NOWJapan’s chief cabinet secretary Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga had announced that the country’s new Imperial era would be named Reiwa.
The name Reiwa represents fortune, peace and harmony and its arrival on May 1, 2019 will signal the end of the 30-year run on the Heisei (achieving peace) era.
Within an hour of the announcement there were 372,000 tweets about Reiwa and the number continues to grow.
Reiwa chief executive Neville Pozzi said the spike in attention from Japan could be an opportunity to lure foreign investment back into our state.
“REIWA is the number one trending hashtag on Twitter, and we even had comments on social media from Japanese people asking the bidding price of REIWA’s domain name,” he said.
“As an institute, we want to embrace all of this traction and use it as an opportunity to entice migration and foreign investment back into our state in a fun and light-hearted way.”
People took to Twitter to make light of the confusion, with one person tweeting “Looks like a certain real estate company in #Perth confused as hell about the explosion in page hits”.
Another added: “The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia’s Twitter account must be exploding right now”.