Turned away by Vancouver’s levy on foreign property buyers, Chinese home-seekers are funneling their yuan where it is apparently wanted: Seattle.

“This is Vancouver 2.0,” Dean Jones, chief executive officer of Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, said of Washington’s largest city, located just 192 kilometres south of the Canadian metropolis. “A lot of the same motivations and goals are being replicated in Seattle.”

Around 50 percent of the Seattle suburb homes that Realogics Sotheby’s sells go to Chinese buyers, up from 30 percent last year, Jones revealed to Bloomberg.

 

While Vancouver home sales plummeted 37 percent in November, some real estate brokers in Seattle would field six calls a night from Chinese home buyers. “Most of my Chinese investors, 60 to 70 percent, compare Vancouver and Seattle,” Carrie Brown, a broker with Seattle real estate firm Ewing & Clark Inc, told Bloomberg.

Purchase inquiries about Seattle homes on China’s largest property portal, rocketed by 143 percent in August, the month after the new tax rate in Vancouver was announced. Inquiries in the British Columbian city fell 81 percent at the same time.

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