• Almost a year after British Columbia brought in a 15-per-cent tax on foreign buyers in Greater Vancouver, the detached housing market in Canada’s most expensive city for housing continues to show limited price growth.

    But while detached price gains continue to be mostly flat, the overall market for housing in Greater Vancouver does show signs of recovering, buoyed by the strength in less expensive segments like condominiums and townhomes, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver said Wednesday.

    “Two distinct markets have emerged this summer. The detached home market has seen demand ease back to more typical levels while competition for condominiums is creating multiple offer scenarios and putting upward pressure on prices for that property type,” Jill Oudil, president of the board, said in a statement.

    The Vancouver results are being watched closely in Ontario, where the province introduced a 15-per-cent non-resident speculation tax in April for homes bought in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, the area that surrounds and includes Toronto. The Toronto Real Estate Board is set to release updated statistics Thursday but provincial officials announced this week, that in the wake of the tax, about 4.7 per cent of home buyers were from abroad.

    There were 1,320 Greater Vancouver detached home sales in June, a 15.5-per-cent decrease from a year ago. The benchmark price for detached properties was $1,587,900, a 1.4-per-cent increase from June 2016 and a 1.1-per-cent increase compared to May 2017.

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