Arizona is a hotspot for Canadian real estate investors, and with optimistic news of vaccine rollouts, investment activity in Phoenix has picked up considerably.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe received the highest ever requests for preapprovals from Canadians over the last two weeks and, because we\u2019re connecting them to local realtors, a lot are moving forward and searching the market,\u201d Florida-based Alain Forget, RBC Bank\u2019s director of business development, told CREW<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s been building since about November and December when the first vaccine rollout announcements were made, and now as people see all the vaccinations done in Canada and the U.S., and the easing of restrictions, people are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They know 2021 will be a much better year.\u201d<\/p>\n In the United States, vaccination programs have by and large been successful and it\u2019s sparked hope of life returning to a more normal pace in 2021. That has, in turn, galvanized a lot of Canadians in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta to search Arizona\u2019s Valley of the Sun for investment opportunities. Forget isn\u2019t surprised to see savvy investors diving headlong into that particular market.<\/p>\n \u201cIn those Canadian provinces, there\u2019s low inventory and multiple offers are common, which pushes prices up, but now they\u2019re starting to realize the U.S. is an option,\u201d he said. \u201cArizona has always been in the top-three destinations for Canadian investors. Scottsdale, which is on the west side of Phoenix in the Valley of the Sun, doesn\u2019t have a lot of land but there\u2019s been a lot of building there in recent years. It\u2019s also very affordable. The average purchase price for Canadian investors in the U.S. is $500,000 and that buys a lot of real estate in Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n The Valley of the Sun is very business-friendly and, as a result, a lot of companies have established their bases of operation in the area, including a lot of Canadian firms. In fact, there\u2019s a lot of active cross-border trading activity occurring with companies based specifically in Arizona, says Forget.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a growing market, in terms of demographics, and one of the top destinations in the U.S. Phoenix is a big city with lot of people and not much land on which to build,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n According to Tricia Lehane, a sales agent with RE\/MAX Excalibur in Phoenix, there are more than 25,000 Canadian homeowners in the Valley of the Sun. As investors, she says they operate both long-term and seasonal rental properties. In particular, the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale area, known as Maricopa<\/a> and Pinal<\/a> counties, is hot.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the [Great Recession] hit, Canadians were coming here in swarms to purchase,\u201d she said. \u201cThey continue to, and I\u2019m sure they always will, invest in Arizona. The average price of a property in the Greater Phoenix Area is $350,000, and the population is just under 5 million.\u201d<\/p>\n In particular, Canadians are partial to purchasing single-family homes as investment properties, which can average about $4,500 in monthly rent in Scottsdale, says Lehane.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Greater Phoenix Area, it\u2019s about $3,500 a month for a year-long rental,\u201d she said. \u201cA lot of my Canadian clients are doing seasonal rentals and they\u2019re bringing in more money. For high-end, larger properties, a seasonal rental can bring in about $25,000 a month, and in South Scottsdale, you\u2019d look at about $10,000-12,000 a month in the high demand season.<\/p>\n \u201cMaricopa County is the third-fastest growing area in the U.S., in terms of inbound movers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arizona is a hotspot for Canadian real estate investors, and with optimistic news of vaccine rollouts, investment activity in Phoenix has picked up considerably. \u201cWe received the highest ever requests for preapprovals from Canadians over the last two weeks and, because we\u2019re connecting them to local realtors, a lot are moving forward and searching the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23364,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050\/revisions\/23364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}