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“I’m sure you can find investors that say, ‘It’s getting a little to rich for me in Vancouver, I’m going down to Seattle,’ ” Gudell said. “I’m not ruling out examples of that, but not in significant numbers.”

Gudell said Seattle is already an attractive destination for foreign property buyers and it’s a hot market, which adds to the complications in trying to attribute increasing activity to the B.C. tax.

And in Metro Vancouver, sales had already started slowing at the same time China instituted new controls limiting the amount of money people could get out of the country, which also have to be factored in, Gudell said.

Zillow published the analysis at the same time cities around North America are attempting to gauge whether they’re getting some spillover of buyers leaving the Vancouver market.

Photo by Derrick Penner/PNG / Vancouver Sun

Ontario, for example, isn’t ruling out its own foreign-buyers tax, the province’s finance minister, Charles Sousa, said, though the government isn’t certain how much of an impact foreign buyers are having in Toronto’s soaring property market.

And Zillow’s findings clash with the experience of the Beijing-based search site Juwai.com, which bills itself as China’s No. 1 property website, which tracked big increases in Seattle-focused queries after the introduction of the tax.

“If the Vancouver tax benefited anyone, it benefited Toronto and Seattle,” said Juwai CEO Charles Pittar in an emailed statement. “We did see a shift in demand to those two cities, although that shift appears to be moderating as time passes, in particular with regards to Seattle.”