Metro Vancouver’s once-mighty luxury home market certainly seems to have fallen, according to new global prime real estate rankings, published May 8.
The latest quarterly rankings by international brokerage Knight Frank placed Metro Vancouver in overall 31st spot for price growth in high-end real estate over the past year, out of 43 global cities surveyed.
Its year-over-year price growth of just 0.2 per cent, among the priciest five per cent of homes, was the slowest increase of the six North American cities surveyed. San Francisco (ranked global #9, with prices up nine per cent), Los Angeles (#11, up 8.1 per cent), Toronto (#18, up 3.4 per cent), Miami (#22, up 2.8 per cent) and New York (#27, up one per cent) all saw steeper price growth.
Looking at sales over the past six months, Metro Vancouver fared even worse, ranking 42nd out of all 43 global cities, with a price decline in high-end homes of 7.6 per cent. Only Stockholm in Sweden saw a bigger price drop, at nine per cent over the past six months.
Vancouver’s slowdown has likely been caused by British Columbia’s “macro-prudential measures” as well as rising borrowing costs, Knight Frank’s head of international residential research Kate Everett-Allen told Bloomberg. She added that in Vancouver, the study looked at properties starting at about $3.5 million.
The global city to see the biggest year-over-year price growth was Seoul, South Korea, followed by Cape Town in South Africa, and Guangzhou, China in third.
Seoul’s year-over-year high-end-home price growth of 24.7 per cent, which was enough to place it in first spot globally, is similar to the luxury-home price increases seen in Metro Vancouver in early 2016.
Despite Sydney, Australia imposing strict foreign buyer restrictions on residential real estate, that city is still seeing significant high-end price growth, with its 8.7 per cent increase putting it in eighth place overall.
Check out the full rankings, below. Red dots on the right indicate a falling market, green a rising market and blue a stable market.
