Housing in the Horseshoe Bay Village area of West Vancouver, B.C., in October, 2025.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
The Vancouver neighbourhoods that have historically been home to its most expensive properties have undergone a huge price shift in the decade and now lag behind the rest of Metro Vancouver.
The west side of the city, as well as West Vancouver, were the only areas to see prices drop in the past 10 years, while the east side of the city saw major gains, according to Greater Vancouver Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service Home Price Index report for February, 2026. Vancouver’s west side house market saw an 8.4-per-cent drop in all property types. West Vancouver declined 5.8 per cent. Meanwhile, the east side detached house market saw a 23.4-per-cent gain.
But the percentage increases weren’t only on the city’s east side. Throughout the region, property prices have grown significantly since 2016. New Westminster house prices are up 42.6 per cent, North Vancouver 25 per cent, Pitt Meadows 84 per cent, Port Coquitlam 68.7 per cent and Squamish 139 per cent.
“The more expensive neighbourhoods are feeling the brunt of the lack of demand,” said west side realtor Lorne Goldman. Why? The question, he said, “boils down to how much of the demand was from foreign buyers.”
Is now a good time to buy or sell? Ask our real estate reporters your questions
Restored 1913 home in Vancouver gets seven offers, sells $301,000 over asking
A contributing factor is that, as younger buyers have gravitated to the city’s east side, cultural amenities have expanded, including in places such as Main Street, where the concentration of high-calibre restaurants has resulted in Mr. Goldman and his colleagues calling it “the Michelin Mile.”
“What’s of interest to me, is if you have, say, a budget of say $2.5-million, traditionally, people would be migrating to the west side with that sort of money. But they’re going to the east side, because they can get a much better house and a better neighbourhood, in their opinion.
“Their money goes further there, and the areas feel more like neighbourhoods with baby strollers around.”
Mr. Goldman say he believes that the huge spike in prices in Whistler, B.C., in the past decade is related to that municipality’s exemption from the foreign buyer tax and the speculation and vacancy tax. In Whistler, the benchmark price of a detached house went up 123 per cent.
Vancouver residents push back on plan they say will obscure rare mountain view
Those provincial taxes, combined with an added tax on homes worth more than $3-million, have impacted the west side property market, he said. He had a client who sold his Coal Harbour condo and bought in Whistler, which he said was a smart move, because his Coal Harbour property probably dropped in value by 25 per cent and his Whistler property went up likely 50 per cent.
Realtor Holly Calderwood, who sells a lot of properties in West Vancouver, said the federal government’s foreign buyer ban has hit the market hard, particularly detached houses. In 2015 and 2016, demand was so high that people were buying houses and flipping them even before the sale completed.
“That’s the No. 1 thing for our market, the foreign buyer ban,” she said. “That’s the big, for sure, trigger, because it was crazy before.”
The current state of West Vancouver’s detached house market is a complete reversal, she said. She is seeing some foreclosures on expensive properties, although she added that desirable turnkey homes are still selling.
“If I were a buyer and I bought something in November of last year, four months later, that property could have dropped like $500,000.”
Non-residents participated in the ownership of 7.6 per cent of all detached houses and 6.8 per cent of all condo purchases in West Vancouver. In the city of Vancouver, non-resident owners were active in 6.5 per cent of all house purchases and 10.9 per cent of all condos. Homes with non-resident owners represent 11.4 per cent of units built from 2016 to 2023 in West Vancouver and 14 per cent in Vancouver. The figures are based on Statistics Canada 2023 figures analyzed by urban planner Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.
Advertised as a building lot, Vancouver house sells below assessed value
Those figures may sound low, but they had a big impact in shaping Vancouver, he said. Prof. Yan co-authored a paper with fellow academics Joshua C. Gordon and David Ley, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies last year, on Vancouver’s housing affordability.
“Long a high-priced market (roughly double the Canadian average), relative house prices in Vancouver compared to other cities surged in the wake of the capital influx from China, suggesting an overvaluation of roughly 30 to 40 per cent from 2015 to 2018. … Once this trans-Pacific wave of capital subsided, due to both taxation measures in B.C. and capital controls in China, relative prices in Vancouver fell sharply…” states the paper, titled Crafting the narrative: wealth migration, growth machines and the politics of housing affordability in Vancouver, Canada.
“You’re seeing the power of global wealth that concentrated in certain parts of the region and how it recalibrated the real estate system. The marginal player defines the pace of the game,” Prof. Yan said.
Last year, the Urban Development Institute wrote a letter to Gregor Robertson, the Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities of Canada, outlining the lobby group’s proposed solutions to improve housing affordability. Included is an amendment to the foreign buyer ban to allow foreign investors to buy newly constructed condos. They argued that such buyers had in the past been a “critical component of the capital stack needed to get projects off the ground.”
Vancouver condo investors sell and head for the sidelines
Greater Vancouver Realtors chief economist Andrew Lis, former senior economist for the provincial government from 2018 to 2022, said that while he recognizes the importance of foreign buyers, he does not believe they’ve “been a key player in driving values.”
Long term, the price evolution, he said, is more related to shifting demographics and population growth. Millennials put a lot of pressure on the housing system, Mr. Lis said.
“When you pair that with what we had over that period of time – very high levels of immigration, particularly over the last five to 10 years – you have a recipe for fairly explosive price growth without having sufficient supply to accommodate all of that demand. That’s really where I see the more credible story of how Vancouver’s home prices got to be where they are … as opposed to somewhat edge cases of things like foreign buyers or speculators and whatnot.”
He said that while there has been some price convergence between markets, it’s also worth noting that benchmark prices on the west side are still higher than the east side, and individual homes will vary. For example, a move-in-ready house on the east side might cost the same as a fixer-upper on the west side.