West Island Living: Chinese foreign buyers flocking to West Island

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Buyers from China and Hong Kong are flocking to the West Island like never before, but they’re not interested in just any home.

The number of foreign buyers in Montreal increased 36 per cent between August 2015 and 2016. According to Geneviève Lapointe, an analyst with Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp (CMHC), most of the recent growth has come from Chinese investors.

China is now one of the top-three sources of foreign investment in real estate here, along with the United States and France. But according to Lapointe, the median price of a home purchased by someone from China was significantly higher: $700,000, compared to $465,000 for Americans and $390,000 for the French.

Although a recent report from CMHC pegged the overall percentage of real estate transactions involving all non-resident property owners at 1.7 per cent in Montreal in 2017, the percentage in select neighbourhoods can be much higher.

Lapointe said Chinese buyers were more likely to buy single-family homes than other investor groups, who mainly buy condominiums. And the West Island is one of the preferred places for them to buy.

Realtor Cassandra Aurora, one of Sotheby’s top-performing brokers in the West Island, said in certain prestigious areas these days the buyer is more likely than not to be Chinese.

“Some are coming to live, some to invest, and some come only two weeks a year,” said Aurora. “Mostly they come to live. They say there’s a lot of pollution, that China is overpopulated, and here there is a better lifestyle and a better opportunity for their children.”

Aurora said Chinese buyers are flocking to homes with a list price between $700,000 and $5-million in wealthy neighbourhoods in Kirkland, Beaconsfield, Pointe-Claire and Senneville. They like homogeneity, she said — no modest $350,000 bungalows next to multi-million-dollar homes. Seeing power lines, hearing airplanes overhead or highway noise, or having to cross a bridge into town are also turnoffs.

Waterfront properties, on the other hand, are very desirable — and even the priciest of Senneville estates appears cheap compared to what the buyer would pay for a waterfront home in Hong Kong, Toronto or Vancouver.

In Kirkland, a listing of Aurora’s that she said would have sold for $650,000 three years ago went for $821,000 in 2017 to a buyer from China, sold in a bidding war for $22,000 over asking. Aurora also recently sold a $2.5-million home in Île-Bizard to a buyer from mainland China, who doesn’t intend to live there full-time.

When she lists a house on some West Island streets, like James Shaw in Beaconsfield, Aurora said she now expects the buyer — and most of the visitors — will be Chinese.

“When I get a non-Chinese person coming through I am shocked,” she said.

Although the total number of Chinese buyers remains small in Montreal, the influx of foreign money is already starting to make an impact in some neighbourhoods. Tune in next week for more on this topic, and to find out about some of the unique ways deals with buyers from China differ from transactions among locals.

— To share your favourite neighbourhoods or other thoughts on local real estate, email westislandliving@gmail.com.