Last year the figure soared to $52 billion. "Within the next four years we expect it to be around $220 billion. It is a massive market and one that is still growing exponentially," Henry said.

Henry and Taylor met in the 1990s in Brisbane, where they worked for the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.

Henry was a part-time security guard at night while studying for his master's degree in business administration. Taylor, who has a classical music background, was manager of the orchestra.

"We used to bump into one another and struck up a friendship, which has lasted to this day," Henry said.

Life could have taken a different turn for him. When he was a teenager, Henry was accepted as an exchange student in Thailand. He was so taken with the Thai culture and its people that he went on to study the Thai language at the prestigious Australian National University in Canberra.

"In many ways it was a misspent youth," he said.

Moving back to Queensland, he pursued his MBA while working at the Queensland University of Technology and part-time for the QPAC.

Both he and Taylor drifted into real estate while working for major Australian real estate company LJ Hooker before heading overseas to Macao and then Hong Kong.

"He (Taylor) is the sales and marketing genius and I am the systems guy," Henry said.

"Our research has shown that there were over 100 million outbound Chinese tourists last year ... that number shows no sign of slowing down, at least not in the near term."

Many traveling Chinese are looking at buying property in countries such as the US and Australia, either as an investment or a place to live for themselves or their children, said Henry. "They are looking for such things as lifestyle, ease of immigration and education," he added.

"When we started to look into this project, there was no one in this space. There was no one providing up-to-date and current information. The market was ... like a big, blue ocean.

"What we were dealing with was two emerging markets: Chinese looking for the first time to buy real estate overseas and the other－agents, brokers and developers－looking at a Chinese audience," Henry said. For the latter, the Chinese market was always a difficult one to access.

Henry and Taylor decided to take a two-pronged business approach, with one part focused on the buyer and the other on the seller. "Our very foundation is research and analysis," said Henry.