Off the wire
• Aussie stocks finish week over one percent stronger  • Sri Lankan PM intervenes to allow former minister to travel overseas  • Huawei overtakes Xiaomi as China's top smartphone vendor  • New domestic flights serve Tibet  • Singapore's consumer prices improves slightly in September  • 2nd group of S.Koreans gather for reunion with DPRK relatives  • Singapore launches new coins featuring its national flower orchid  • Feature: Japan Inc. approves more immigration, but archaic hegemony undermines progress  • Apple announces clean-energy investments in China  • 4-year-old Albanian child accidentally kills sister with shotgun  
You are here: 　 Home

Vancouver condos attract Chinese investors

Xinhua, October 23, 2015 Adjust font size:

Roughly 600 of Vancouver's top real estate brokers and developers packed a Vancouver downtown hotel on Thursday to hear a message that came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the Canadian city's real estate market.

Michael Ferreira, managing principal of Urban Analytics, a Real Estate and Urban Planning Consultant company, made a keynote speech on the housing market development, saying slow supply of new housing drives prices higher and higher, creating what he called an "urgency play" in the market.

"We've got so much demand in the marketplace, and supply of product is dwindling, as my statistics showed, and so it's a good old-fashioned supply and demand issue where you've got demand exceeding supply, and when we're not bringing enough new product onto the market there just builds a sense of urgency of pent-up demand," Ferreira told Xinhua at the conference.

The average price of a house in the Greater Vancouver region climbed to nearly 1.5 million CAD (1.12 million U.S. dollars) this year, that is a 20-percent increase over the average price of a house compared with last year.

A lot of the anecdotal feedback from realtors in the region point to buyers from the Chinese mainland as the main driver of home prices, said Ferreira, adding that in the last year more Chinese buyers were seeking condos in and around Vancouver.

They are attracted by the low Canadian dollar and the notion that Vancouver's quality of life is world class. They are also being driven here by the incredibly high price of real estate in major cities in China.

"We're seeing some fairly rapid escalation in pricing in the areas where Chinese buyer is most active. Particularly in the core neighborhoods you can see rapid transit and retail centers being developed or already developed. That's where you're seeing the most increase."

Downtown Vancouver is considered a top locale by many residents. Some units in new concrete condo towers are selling for 1,100 CAD (825 U.S. dollars) per square foot.

And Ferreira expects prices like that to hold, at least for the short term future.

"I think we'll see the market continue through the rest of this year and certainly through the first half of next year. If we continue to see the escalation in pricing that we've seen over the last six to eight months in some of these areas, my fear is that it's unsustainable," he added. Endi