Vancouver tax pushes Chinese to Seattle

Just a few days after Vancouver announced a tax on foreign property investors, Seattle real estate broker Lili Shang received a WeChat message from a wealthy Chinese businessman who wanted to sell a home in Canada and buy in her area.

After a week of showings, he purchased a $1 million property in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle. He soon returned to buy two more, including a $2.2 million house in Clyde Hill paid for with a single cashier's check.

Shang said she's been inundated with similar requests from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong after Vancouver's provincial government enacted a 15 percent tax on foreign homebuyers in August to help cool soaring real estate values. With Chinese investors - the largest pool of foreign capital - looking for a place to put their cash, the unintended consequence of the fee has been to push demand to cities such as Seattle and Toronto.