In Manhattan, half the luxury condos built in the past five years remain unsold.

Vancouver builders are watching as thousands of New York City condos in glistening “super-skinny” towers, rapidly erected to serve a flood of demand from global millionaires, are largely empty as that city core’s real-estate bubble is bursting.

The future is looking wobbly for high-end developers in potentially more risky Vancouver, where prices in the past decade have risen three times faster than in the Big Apple. In both places, middle-class young people are being squeezed out of home ownership.

Even though there are differences between the affluent housing markets in New York and Vancouver, which are routinely ranked among the world’s sought-after destinations, the downward trend is similar in the East and West Coast cities.

As with New York’s flashy highrises, many luxury condos with spectacular views in Vancouver are going un-bought. Dramatic price drops are also occurring among the posh single-family residences of Metro Vancouver, where prices have plunged by more than one-quarter since the peak in 2017.

Global media outlets have noted that popular Canadian singer Michael Bublé last year had to sell his sprawling West Vancouver mansion for 28 per cent less than its assessed value. It was bought by the only one who showed interest: An increasingly hard-to-find buyer from China.

Prices have plummeted by more than 25 per cent in the past two years across hilly West Vancouver, which is often ranked as the municipality with the highest per capita income in Canada. A similar dip has occurred in the city of Vancouver and many of its suburbs, where assessed values went down by more than 11 per cent in 2019 alone.

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