As Goes Vancouver, So Goes Seattle?

Journalist and author Paul Roberts reports in Crosscut about the implosion in Vancouver, B.C.'s housing market and its effects on the Seattle housing market.

Only three months ago, the British Columbia Real Estate Association forecasted a rosy 5.8 percent price increase for Vancouver-area housing in 2017. But in a report last week, the organization predicted that prices would instead fall by almost nine percent.

So, what, if anything, does Vancouver’s implosion mean for the Seattle area? A great deal, actually. Already, some of the foreign capital that was either in Vancouver or headed there has since shifted to other markets — notably, our own. Realtors here report a steady uptick in purchases by wealthy foreign buyers. Dean Jones, head of Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, which focuses in part on Asian buyers, estimates that half of the Seattle-area suburban home sales handled by the firm this year have involved Chinese buyers — up from perhaps 30 percent in 2015, according to a recent Bloomberg story.