Vancouver leads global price growth

Photo: BrianFagan

Vancouver is leading property price growth around the globe for the second quarter in a row.

The Canadian city, along with Toronto, has been racing ahead of the rest of the country in the past year, thanks to a limited amount of supply and strong demand. The resulting growth is not only outstripping Canada's regional markets, but also global cities, according to Knight Frank.

The agency's latest Prime Globe Cities Index ranks Vancouver as the number one for growth in the third quarter of 2015, with prime property prices rising 20.4 per cent year-on-year. Supply, notes Knight Frank, has plunged 32 per cent in the last 12 months.

Vancouver has even outpaced Sydney, where foreign investment in the Australian capital has helped to push property prices up to record highs. Sydney's growth was also in the double-digits, at 13.7 per cent, followed by Shanghai at 10.7 per cent, but neither were enough to catch up with Vancouver.

In Shanghai, the introduction of new fiscal measures, including tax and interest rate cuts, has fuelled demand.

Looking beyond the top rankings, though, the overall performance of the index is less robust: the index now stands 34.1 per cent above its low in Q1 2009 but its annual rate of growth has slowed significantly from 7 per cent two years ago to 1.9 per cent.