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Jonathan Baker is the first to admit he shouldn’t be complaining about foreign investors driving up prices in Vancouver’s red-hot housing market. They helped the retired lawyer pocket millions.

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Baker and his wife sold their five-bedroom home for $3 million in December, a 100-fold gain from their purchase price in 1970. The house went for $300,000 over asking after an offshore investor bid up the price and was later flipped several times to other buyers. Now the home sits empty in Vancouver’s Dunbar neighborhood, the telltale sign of a buyer who lives abroad, he says.

“You can’t be too critical when you’ve benefited from it,” Baker, 78, said by phone from his 4,200-square-foot, $1.5 million seaside home in Sechelt, B.C., bought using proceeds from his Vancouver sale. “But the city has become a commodity. One group like myself has bought early, we were lucky. But we no longer knew our neighbours. It’s empty.”