Metro Vancouver housing builders and the real estate industry are bracing for a big surge of immigrants to wash into the region once travel is allowed again, with some possible extra pushes coming from Hong Kong, India, the Philippines and even Indonesia.
“They don’t like to rent for very long. They’ll pool resources to buy,” said Michael Ferreira, whose Vancouver-based company Urban Analytics tracks new building and forecasts real estate trends. Although Canada admitted only 185,000 immigrants last year during the pandemic slowdown, compared with 340,000 in 2019, the Immigration Minister has recently said it is on target to admit 400,000 in 2021.In the past three years, B.C. typically saw 60,000 new immigrants a year arrive in the province. While the top country of origin was China 10 years ago, that’s been replaced by India.
They are wondering how many people there might be like Jenny Liu, who grew up in Vancouver after her parents immigrated in the 1990s, worked in Hong Kong and the U.S. for 20 years and then decided five years ago to come back to Vancouver.