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Critics slammed the B.C. government’s new data that foreign buyers account for five per cent of Metro Vancouver home sales, saying it misses the impact of offshore capital.

“The important question is not who is buying, but where the money is coming from,” said University of British Columbia associate professor Tom Davidoff. “If Vancouver is becoming a hard place to work and live, and if people who are permanent residents and citizens — with (overseas sources of) cash from relatives, business associates or themselves — are buying homes, it still poses a challenge.”

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On Thursday, the provincial government unveiled its first set of information based on sales from June 10 to 29, when it started to collect information about the citizenship of homebuyers who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

It said foreign nationals accounted for five per cent, of just over 5,000, Metro Vancouver home sales worth $5.4 billion, even though they bought more expensive homes than Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Buyers from China made up 90 per cent of those 259 foreign national buyers.