The Australia property sector now ranks as the world's most transparent market, pushing the Canada property market into second place, according to The 2010 Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI).
The traditionally most transparent property markets in the world - Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada - have now been caught up by a number of European property markets, including Sweden, Ireland and France.
However, the report shows that it's the housing markets in the Asia Pacific region that have shown the most broadly-based improvements in transparency over the past two years.
Australia and New Zealand are the region's most transparent markets, closely followed by Singapore and Hong Kong.
However, it is in India and China where the region's greatest advances have been recorded, a trend that has now filtered across each of their secondary and tertiary cities.
But Asia Pacific also continues to show some of the biggest anomalies, with both Japan and South Korea showing low levels of real estate transparency relative to their economic maturity.
In fact a number of markets have seen declining or static levels of transparency with one-third (27 markets out of 81) recording either deterioration or no improvement between 2008 and 2010.
Deterioration has been registered in markets such as Pakistan, Kuwait, Venezuela, Dubai and Bahrain. Although the levels of decline have been modest, the reversal of their past gains is notable.
Transparency within the property industry is essential for anyone considering buying property within a particular country.