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If $45 billion in foreign-owned Metro Vancouver housing represents the “tip of the iceberg” — to use the recent words of one federal official — then Andy Yan is a bit worried about what’s under the water.

Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, spent the past three weeks “drilling deep” into gigabytes of raw data on Vancouver property ownership, released last month by Statistics Canada.

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Yan’s analysis shows that the kinds of condominiums sought by and sized for Vancouver families hoping to live in the city where they work also appear especially desirable to people in other countries who want to put their money in those condos, but not their families.

While some real estate industry figures maintain that local demand drives Metro Vancouver’s housing market, where prices across the region increased 65 per cent in the last three years, other experts say the new figures reveal a level of foreign ownership high enough to put substantial pressure on pricing.