Vancouver, British Columbia – The New Target Of International Real Estate Investors
By Luigi Frascati

I am not going to deny it: after thirty-four years of living in this city I am still thoroughly in love with it. And mind you, I was born in and am coming from another beautiful city, renown throughout the world for its beauty and fine arts: Florence, Italy. And this is the thing with me. When you come from a pretty town like Florence, Italy it takes truly a lot to make you fall in love with another pretty town. In this respect, therefore, the judgment I render on Vancouver, BC is certainly more rigorous than the critiques other people might proffer.

There are indeed quite a few things that make Vancouver, BC one of a kind town. For starters, if you choose to make Canada your new home - or second home - this is the only one place where temperatures are ‘civilized’ pretty much all year round. Our 2 degrees Celsius (37 degrees Fahrenheit) minimum wintertime average does not sound that bad when you compare it to the minus XX for the rest of the country. Secondly, Vancouver is definitely not a working town. With a mean yearly income of CAD $84,000 per household, a fantastic scenery and the prettiest girls in Canada, Vancouverites are faithful followers of the West Coast lifestyle, originally imported from San Francisco – except that here we do it better. In fact, whereas in San Francisco people actually work for eight hours a day (or so they say), here we do absolutely nothing day and night – except pretending to go to work.

Like San Francisco, Vancouver is crowded with Chinese people (which include Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan in addition, of course, to Mainland China), except that ours are the wealthy Chinese – at least judging from the fact that they have snapped up all the real estate they could possibly buy, and then gotten into high-rises development and given the Vancouver skyline a much needed facelift. Which, by the way, brings up to mind the fact that when I bought my one bedroom plus den apartment here in Downtown – one of the five properties I own - where I am writing this Article right now, on the twenty-fourth floor of an ultra-modern skyscraper with all the facilities and amenities one could possibly imagine and a fabulous view, I paid CAD $155,000 for it in 2001 (about USD $124,000 back then), and now a good friend of mine has just sold her own apartment, which is pretty much like mine but on the twelfth floor of the same building for CAD $305,000 (I brought her an offer of CAD $295,000 and she did not even counter ...).