The stunning rise in Vancouver’s home prices is a recent phenomenon. As Justin McElroy, a Canadian journalist, pointed out on Twitter last week, the average price of a Greater Vancouver home rose as much in the past six months as it did from 1980 to 2006. (When those figures are adjusted for inflation, the trend looks even crazier. In today’s Canadian dollars, the city’s housing prices grew by only roughly $150,000 between 1980 and 2006, but shot up by $375,000 in the last six months.)
The buyers behind the surge are impossible to trace – British Columbia doesn’t track the citizenship of home buyers, though it announced plans this week to start doing so. But many experts are blaming the surge on an influx of cash from wealthy Chinese, who are rushing to send investments out of their country as its economy slows.
