Commentary

Human rights activist tears a strip off Vancouver journalists' one-dimensional coverage of Vancouver housing market

by Charlie Smith on July 7th, 2016 at 2:53 PM
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      Today, the B.C. government released an analysis of 19 days of regional property sales. And as my colleague Travis Lupick reported, it showed that foreign nationals were responsible for just 4.1 of property sales in Vancouver, compared to 14.3 percent in Richmond, 10.9 percent in Burnaby, and 3.3 percent in Surrey.

      Across Metro Vancouver, foreign nationals accounted for 5.1 percent of property sales and only three percent across B.C.

      These new numbers led human rights activist Victor Wong to question whether Vancouver journalists will acknowledge that their coverage of the housing market has been mistaken.

      Wong is a former NDP federal candidate in Vancouver Kingsway and previously worked at Statistics Canada.

      The numbers released by Finance Minister Mike de Jong reinforced the results of a forthcoming study by SFU's Andrey Pavlov and UBC's Tsur Somerville, which was covered by Lupick last month. Their research suggested that foreign money can't account for sharply rising real-estate prices in Metro Vancouver.

      Many media reports focusing on Chinese buyers ignore the effects of other factors. They include quantitative easing by central banks, international and interprovincial migration to B.C., and the monumental amounts of housing equity in the hands of aging baby boomers, who are passing along some of this wealth to their kids.

      In the first three months of 2016, there was a net rise of 7,426 immigrants and a net increase of 5,067 interprovincial migrants to this province, according to B.C. Stats.

      In a speech to the Urban Development Institute in June, real-estate marketer Bob Rennie said that boomers in the Lower Mainland have clear title to $197 billion worth of residential real estate.

      Below, you can read more tweets by Wong regarding the media frenzy over foreign buying of Vancouver real estate:

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