Vancouver home sales dive for 5th consecutive month in Dec

Vancouver

VANCOUVER-AREA home sales, hit by a tax on foreign buyers, fell for the fifth month in a row in December, dropping nearly 40 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier and down almost 23 per cent from November, data released on Wednesday showed.

The hardest hit segment in Canada's most expensive property market was single-family detached homes, where sales slumped 52.4 per cent compared with December 2015, according to data from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. The benchmark price for detached homes in the picturesque West Coast city was C$1.48 million (S$1.6 million) in December, down 1.8 per cent on the previous…