The $73 billion pie: a home-selling bonanza in 3 charts

More than $70 billion was paid for homes in the Lower Mainland, as realtors and government raked in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Author

Tyler Olsen
January 18, 2022

Seventy-three billion dollars*. That, give or take a few hundred million, is how much money traded hands during 2021’s unprecedented home-buying frenzy in the Lower Mainland. Homes in the Fraser Valley accounted for around $11 billion of that.

From Vancouver to Hope, the precise amount that traded hands was $72,608,153,752, according to figures released monthly by local real estate boards and added up by The Current.

About $4.3 billion worth of homes were sold in Langley, $3.5 billion was spent on homes between Chilliwack and Hope, $3 billion traded hands in Abbotsford, and Mission saw about $870 million in home sales. The figures illustrate the seismic economic effects of 2021’s surge in home-buying.

They suggest around $200 million ended up in the hands of the provincial government in property transfer taxes. Even more went to real estate agents: if an average home sale involved commissions of 5%, around $500 million would have been paid in commissions. All those figures are just for those properties between Langley and Hope.

March was, across the Lower Mainland, the busiest month, with nearly $10 billion of home sales in that month alone. A shorter supply of homes for sale, particularly in Vancouver, saw those figures drop, though every month beyond February saw more than $5 billion of home sales across the region.

*Corrected figure: in our Tuesday newsletter, a data entry error led us to initially report $84 billion had been spent on homes last year. The correct figure wasn’t quite that high.

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