Chinese buyers' impact on Vancouver's housing 'limited'

VANCOUVER -- Chinese buyers have limited impact on Vancouver's overall housing market, a Canadian real estate expert has said recently.

Top 6 overseas destinations for Chinese homebuyers

While Vancouver's housing prices have remained among the most expensive in the world, the Chinese factor has only had an impact on selected Vancouver neighborhoods, said Dan Scarrow of MacDonald Realty, one of Vancouver's largest real estate firms.

A recent study by the real estate company found that immigrants from China purchased about a third of the 531 single-family homes through the company's Vancouver agents last year.

Most of the Chinese clients bought houses in some expensive parts of the city, which are located near good schools, the study shows.

The average price the Chinese buyers paid for their houses was more than 2 million Canadian dollars ($1.84 million), while the average price of a detached house in Vancouver this year has settled around 1.4 million Canadian dollars ($1.29 million).

There were certain neighborhoods in the city which had been impacted by the Chinese factor, but other areas in the city and other municipalities surrounding Vancouver have not seen such effect, yet housing prices in those areas have also gone up, he said.

There are no legal restrictions on foreigners buying houses in Canada, and most of their Chinese buyers plan to make Vancouver their permanent home, Scarrow added.

"There is fear locally that there is a lot of foreign investment in Canada amongst people that have no connection with the city whatsoever, but our experience has been: Everyone that has bought either is planning on immigrating to Canada or has immigrated to Canada. So that fear really hasn't been born out by the stats," Scarrow told Xinhua.

Vancouver was ranked third on the list of most livable cities in the world by The Economist magazine last week, only after Melbourne of Australia and Vienna of Austria.