Immigration, Capital Flows and Housing Prices

Abstract

Research on immigration and real estate has found that immigrants lower house prices in immigrant destination neighborhoods. In this article, we find that this latter result is not globally true. Rather, we show that immigrants can raise neighborhood house prices, at least in the case of the wealthy immigrants that we study. We exploit a surprise suspension and subsequent closure of a popular investor immigration program in Canada to use a difference‐in‐differences methodology comparing wealthy immigrant destination census tracts to nondestination tracts. We find that the unexpected suspension of the program had a negative impact on house prices of 1.7–2.6% in the neighborhoods and market segments most favored by the investor immigrants. This leads to an approximate lower bound on the effect of capital inflows of 5%.