Vancouver Housing Tax Pushes Chinese to $1 Million Seattle Homes

After a week of showings, he purchased a $1 million property in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle. He soon returned to buy two more, including a $2.2 million house in Clyde Hill paid for with a single cashier's check.

...

Home-purchase inquiries from China have jumped in Seattle and Toronto since the Vancouver tax was announced, according to Juwai.com, the country's largest overseas property website.

...

About half of the homes sold in Seattle's suburbs are going to Chinese buyers, with many of the transactions requiring the use of interpreters, international banks and multiple escrow deposits, according to Dean Jones, chief executive officer of Realogics Sotheby's International Realty. That's up from about 30 percent last year, he said.

"This is Vancouver 2.0," said Jones, who lived in the Canadian city about two decades ago, when the capital flow from Asia started to accelerate. "A lot of the same motivations and goals are being replicated in Seattle."