The Hongcouver | The rule of thirds: New evidence of the Chinese role in Vancouver’s housing market
33 per cent of house buyers in city last year were mainlanders, according to leading firm
There are at least three ways to respond to the influx of mainland Chinese money to Vancouver’s real estate market, depending on your perspective of the phenomenon.
One position is to oppose it on the grounds that it has helped boost housing unaffordability to unacceptable levels: of the 36,973 rich migrants known to have moved to British Columbia under the now-defunct immigrant investor scheme from 2005 to 2012, 30,013 were Chinese.
Yet, if we accept that Chinese money has helped impoverish that generation of Vancouverites now on the wrong end of the housing equation, who are scrimping in order to participate in a sky-high market, then it must be equally true that those who came before them have been enriched as a result of the same high prices.
It’s the latter proposition which bolsters the case of those who hold the second position, that the influx of Chinese wealth has brought benefits to Vancouver too, helping transform it into a truly international city in the process.
Dan Scarrow, vice-president for corporate strategy at Macdonald Realty, said he saw both sides of the argument. “People are inherently suspicious of any sort of change; by its nature there are going to be pockets of the city that benefit and pockets that probably are hurt by it,” he said. “It’s not a uniformly good phenomenon and it’s not a uniformly bad phenomenon.”
