Vancouver Real Estate
A yearly trend, which sees huge amounts of Chinese investor's visiting Canada to buy property has several Vancouver real estate experts bracing themselves for another busy Lunar New Year. This anticipation may be peaked of late as a result of heightened restrictions on Chinese property investment. With this brings high expectations the first few months of 2012 will be injected with more activity in the local Vancouver housing market.
Google Maps
Research has shown that the Chinese continue to develop an insatiable appetite to call home and purchase property in towns in and outside of China. China's National Bureau of Statistics revealed that for the first time, the number of city-dwellers outnumbered those in rural areas. The newest figures for 2011 show 51.3 percent of China's population reside in urban areas.
Real Estate accounts for nearly 13 percent of China's booming economy and contains had few signs of slowing down with growth estimated at 28 percent annually. This has lead to many economists to demand regulations stating that the numbers are unsustainable and so are creating an unbalanced housing market.
The benefits of having a red hot real estate market, is that property prices have allowed for your government to spend exorbitant levels of money. But as provinces and native municipalities sell land and employ land for large loans, economist have raised concerns of an emerging debt crisis similar to that of the US and Europe.
Real Estate
To be able to address these concerns, a number of new government restrictions including higher down payments and restrictions on multiple owning a home, has seen overall investment in property decrease. The slowing with the Chinese housing market has been around large part intentional, especially in the fastest growing urban property markets like in Shanghai and Beijing.
The cooling real estate market and a larger than expected drop in exports happen to be the two large influences about the slowdown of the Chinese economy. Investment in property in China fell to 12.3 percent in December from 20.1 % in the month of November.
With a large amount of capital plus a thirst for investment opportunities, many Chinese investors have been turning their attention to the Vancouver real estate market. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported gains inside the detached housing market in areas for example Richmond and Vancouver West well over 56.2 percent and 70.9 percent in the last three years. These two areas and a growing number of surrounding markets are fuelled by the increasing number of foreign investors with large sums of capital.
Julia Lau, a Chinese real estate specialist at Sotheby's International Realty Canada believes that the efforts by the Chinese government to limit home purchases in China are pushing investors to appear abroad to places like Vancouver. With Beijing and Shanghai's valuation on properties, Vancouver may be an attractive alternative.