Asia Pacific made the greatest progress globally in terms of real estate transparency during the past two years, according to JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2016. The index measures transparency by looking at factors including data availability, governance, transaction processes, and the regulatory and legal environment.

Asia Pacific is a diverse region in terms of real estate transparency. Australia continues to hold the top spot as the region’s most transparent real estate market and, together with New Zealand, is classified as highly transparent.

Overall, improvements in most countries across the region have been small. The most improvement in the latest survey was seen in Taiwan, which has moved into the transparent category for the first time. More moderate improvements were achieved by Japan, South Korea, India and China, with China’s first-tier cities (Beijing and Shanghai) now on the cusp of the transparent category. At the other end of the s