Canadians who winter in the United States (“Snowbirds”) are increasingly looking to sell their seasonal properties south of the Border.
This has been widely reported1 and rightly so: Canadians are the largest cohort of foreign property owners.
US Real Estate Buyers by Nationality
Since their interest is concentrated in only a handful of geographies, the selling pressure will affect these places disproportionately.
The risk of widespread selling is more credible for Canadians than for other nationalities that own homes in the US: most of the properties held by Canadians are vacation homes, rather than primary residences.
US Real Estate Purchases by Use
But while this trend has been reported elsewhere using anecdotes, none—as far as we can tell—have used an empirical approach to identify the specific markets most at risk.
In our analysis here, we estimate the geolocations of Canadian Snowbird ownership of US properties using Census Bureau microdata. These household-level records allow us to identify a cohort that likely closely proxies Snowbirds: those over 65 years old, born in Canada, living in the US on the Census date, but without American permanent residency or citizenship.
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- most recently, in the Wall Street Journal[↩]