Super-Heated Housing Markets Around The World Look To Vancouver

But isn't Canada a country built on immigration? Jordens points to the thousands of unoccupied flats across the city, built for investors who often never reside there. "If you are coming to live here, get a job and pay taxes, that's great. The trouble is they don't live here, and they don't pay taxes."

There are an estimated 10,000-plus empty apartments in Vancouver, of which a significant number are owned by foreign investors. In mid-September, 200 protestors from a new campaign group, HALT -- Housing Action for Local Taxpayers -- took to Vancouver's streets demanding action to control the market. Among the speakers were academics who argue that the Canadian home-owning dream is being crushed because they can't compete with foreign investors.

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The protests appear to be working: an empty homes tax last week won the approval of city councillors and is set to be implemented next year. Even owners of empty Airbnb flats could be fined $10,000 for failing to comply. Vancouver is fast turning into a test-bed of initiatives to cool outrageous property prices and rents.

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Vancouver's experiment is being closely watched in London. According to London Assembly member Sian Berry, who stood as the Green party's candidate for mayor: "Vancouver shows that the very rich buying up luxury flats at the expense of ordinary people is not just a London problem -- it's a growing problem all over the world.

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Berry's concerns are shared not only by the left. The Bow Group, a conservative thinktank, issued a paper last year in which it talked of a global super-rich elite, some of them criminal, snapping up property in London, pushing up costs for existing residents and throwing the poor to the edges of the city.

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On the other side of the Pacific to Vancouver, the same arguments are rehearsed in Australia and New Zealand, although not just about the global elite. One recent report followed a day of family home auctions in Sydney's northern suburbs; all but one property were said to have been bought by Chinese buyers, with even modest homes fetching A$1.8m (£1.05m).

Two decades ago, buying a house in a major Australian city cost around five times the income of the average young Australian. Now, after the country's economic boom, it is about 15 times.