JuwAi.Com sees more interest in Montreal Real Estate
If you’re shopping for a home in Quebec, most buyers turn to centris.com or realtor.com. For Chinese-speaking buyers shopping for international property, the go-to real estate portal for listings all around the world is juwai.com, which boasts more than 2.8 million listings from more than 90 countries.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume Juwai is just a Chinese version of Centris. According to CEO Carrie Law, since the site’s launch seven years ago, Juwai has evolved from simply providing a way for Chinese-language buyers to shop for international property in their own language to also offering services for realtors and developers in countries around the world to bridge language and cultural gaps to make connections with Chinese buyers.
When it comes to international real estate, Law said, they’re not just selling homes: they’ve also got to paint a picture of a place.
It’s one of the reasons Montreal has been overlooked so long, she said. Unlike in Vancouver and Toronto, in China, most buyers don’t have a clear picture about what life is like here.
“To understand the Chinese market, you have to realize they don’t have the concept of the community at all,” she said. “To the Chinese people they may just know the name, that the city is called Montreal. If you don’t describe the neighbourhood to them, the proximity of everything, the lifestyle, what they need to watch out for, it is difficult for them to appreciate the apartments or houses.”
On Centris, when a buyer finds a property that interests them, they contact a realtor to find more information. On Juwai, buyers deal with a call centre first. The call centre translates inquiries and supplies buyers with information on properties and locations, but it also has another purpose: data-mining.
Buyers are quizzed about whether they are buying for investment, personal use or other purposes, buying criteria, and how much money they have to spend — information that Juwai uses to fine-tune both the way it markets properties to buyers, as well as how the company works with realtors and developers overseas.
Law said China’s affluent and upper-middle class is estimated to reach 220 million by the year 2022, while the number of high-net-worth individuals has increased ninefold in the past decade — two-thirds of whom have investments in international property. The overall value of Chinese investment in international property ballooned from $5 billion in 2010 to $119.7 billion USD last year.
Canada has been one of the more popular destinations for these investors, but the mania for Canadian real estate may be waning.
A new report on Chinese global property investment released Thursday by Juwai found the number of buyers shopping purely for investment properties is decreasing in Canada, and less money overall is flowing into Canadian real estate from China compared to previous years.
According to the report, the overall value of Chinese investment in Canadian residential property was down 55 per cent in 2017, compared to the previous year, while commercial investment dropped 61 per cent.
Yet it seems Montreal is bucking the trend. There has been a sharp uptick in interest in Montreal-area properties on juwai. com in the past year, and figures from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation also show a noteworthy increase in foreign buyers, including those from China.
Law said she believes taxes on foreign buyers imposed in Vancouver and Toronto have turned off some buyers, driving them to consider investing in lower priced markets such as Montreal.
“For $300,000 or so you can buy a single-family home in Montreal, but it’s $1.5 million to buy something of the same size in Vancouver,” Law explained. “It becomes very attractive for Chinese buyers to own their house in Montreal, especially since it is one of the largest cities in Canada.”
Last year in Canada, Juwai estimates that foreign buyers, many of whom were from China, accounted for at least two per cent of transactions in Toronto, four per cent in Vancouver, and just under two per cent in Montreal.