Toronto Star
Canada’s housing market drawing the big-money crowd
Sotheby’s finds more foreign buyers looking to Canada as a safe and stable place to live
The Toronto Star
According to Sotheby's, foreign interest in high-dollar homes like this one is increasing.
Sotheby’s International Realty is seeing a surge in demand from wealthy Syrians, Egyptians and Europeans looking for a safe and relatively stable place to park their millions — Canada’s softening real estate market.
There has been an uptick in “very significant transactions” in tony areas like Oakville and North Toronto by Europeans, many with young families who originally had planned to settle in the U.S. but fell in love with Canada instead, says Sotheby’s Canada CEO Ross McCredie.
At the same time, Montreal’s exclusive Westmount area has become top of the real estate wish list for high-net worth Syrians and Egyptians looking for a safe haven for their money and families, he added.
Increasingly, many of these deals — especially those over $10 millionthose over $10 million — aren’t even showing up in MLS sales tallies because of buyers seeking the privacy afforded by private or exclusive deals, or finalized under the cloak of a corporate purchase, McCredie noted.
“The lack of inventory is a big problem in the high-end market,” so agents are having to find their own properties rather than look to the MLS system, said Andy Taylor of Sotheby’s Toronto office, which has done more international business in the last 18 months than in the last six years.
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