There’s no way to know how many of those were Chinese nationals because the only group with that data is FINCEN. So how exactly did you do this, and which county was it?
The county tax assessor records are public in California. They include the person or entity who is on the hook for paying the property tax and their address. Most homes in Santa Clara county are owned by the people who live in them and their name and the address of the parcel match the title (also a public record). Companies and property managers have the tax bill sent to the company office. Typically (but not always) LLC ownership included the "LLC" in the name so "Snow garden LLC" was a good sign that it was owned by an LLC but if it went to the same address as the parcel we counted it as being the owner. Similarly for trusts (a lot of people put their property into living trusts) and they have the same sorts of rules.
It was possible to just crawl the web for this information however California has tightened things up a bit and made it harder to do so, you can always go into the county clerk's office however and get access there. Realtors use a service which collects this data and I got access to it through a friend who owns a realtor's license.
