Tsur Somerville, a UBC real estate economist spoke to the Vancouver Sun for a story on dropping home sales in Metro Vancouver.
Official MLS data available only to realtors showed that home sales in Metro Vancouver declined by up to 86 per cent after the foreign investor tax was introduced earlier this month.
UBC real estate economist Tsur Somerville said he believes that the offshore buyer tax slowed sales, but warns against reading too much into August statistics.
“It was a dramatic intervention,” Somerville said. “Part of that could be the foreign buyers (exiting the market) but more critically I think it is people saying ‘I don’t know where this is going, let me wait it out.’ So that would cause a drying up in market liquidity in August.”
The story also appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.
