Westside Realtor – “Our office has done 50 sales this year, which is pretty incredible. Half of those sales are from mainland China.”

Anecdote extracted from ‘Chinese Spreading Wealth Make Vancouver Homes Pricier Than NYC’, by Hui-yong Yu and Christopher Donville, 17 May 2011, at bloomberg.com : “Our office has done 50 sales this year, which is pretty incredible,” said Vancouver realtor Tom Gradecak at his office in Point Grey, where he has one colleague who speaks Mandarin and Cantonese and is hiring a second. “Half of those sales are from mainland China.” One Chinese buyer paid C$1.7 million in March for a five- bedroom, three-bath house that the previous owners had completely renovated in 2003, C$150,000 more than the asking price, said Gradecak. The buyer plans to tear it down and build anew. “There’s more value in the land,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of empty nesters cashing out.”