People with Canadian addresses have on average made up 1.5 per cent of buyers in the Phoenix area since 2007. In the past year, that has dropped to 0.27 per cent.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Canadians do not appear to be getting over it.
When President Donald Trump returned to office with tariffs and declarations of Canada as the 51st state, snowbirds turned tail across the U.S. That was spring, an easy time to head back north.
Now, however, as fall colours signal winter’s imminent arrival, new data show little sign of Canadians flocking back to the sunny south for the cold months.
In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and Scottsdale, fully 6 per cent of homes registered to people with Canadian mailing addresses have sold in the past 12 months. Another 2 per cent are for sale, according to data compiled by Mike Orr, owner of The Cromford Report, which analyzes property markets in Arizona.
“What is most extraordinary is the low number of buyers from Canada,” said Mr. Orr. Those numbers have contracted 43 per cent from the previous year, to numbers beneath even pandemic lows.
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Since 2007, people with Canadian addresses have on average made up 1.5 per cent of buyers in the Phoenix area. In the past year, that has fallen to 0.27 per cent, even as numbers of other out-of-state buyers, such as Californians, have held steady.
The data do not capture Canadians who use a U.S. tax address. Nor do they reflect other U.S. activity by Canadians, including investors and small business owners who, some real estate agents say, appear to be doing the inverse, moving themselves and their money south in increasing number.
But the virtual disappearance of Canadian vacation home buyers from some of Arizona’s most coveted neighbourhoods suggests that the political ruptures of the Trump era have taken an enduring toll.
“Things have changed for sure. People who have been coming down for a number of years have decided this is a good time to exit, whether it’s for a political reason or a financial reason,” said Miles Zimbaluk, a Canadian in Arizona who specializes in cross-border real estate.
Mr. Zimbaluk moved to Arizona from Saskatchewan a decade ago, and his clientele is almost exclusively Canadian. It wasn’t long ago that they were roughly split between buyers and sellers. “Now, pretty much everybody we talk to is selling,” he said.
“I’ve had calls from lots of people who said, ‘we want to list it this fall. We’ll come back, clean out our personal items, maybe use it for a month or two, and then we want to sell it.’”
Mr. Zimbaluk’s experience is reflected at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, where the number of available commercial carrier seats from Canada is down 12 per cent from a year ago. (That decline will be offset by new Porter Airline flights, announced this week, from Ottawa and Vancouver.)
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The mood has changed, said Oriana Lehman Wood, who specializes in luxury properties with Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty.
She polled 72 of her colleagues from across the U.S. and Canada. Canadian clients, they reported, have taken new interest in Mexico, Costa Rica and Portugal.
“It parallels a lot of what the U.S. buyer is looking at when they look at external purchases,” she said.
Canadians first flocked in large numbers to Arizona in the wake of the great financial crisis, when the loonie rose to par as the U.S. housing market collapsed. In 2009 and 2010, Canadian homebuyers even outnumbered Californians, Mr. Orr said. (In 2010, foreclosures made up 39 per cent of Arizona home transactions.)
Much has changed since then. Arizona home prices have tripled, while the U.S. dollar has considerably strengthened. Canadians who bought 15 years ago have seen enormous gains.
There are, however, signs that at least some of the departed snowbirds are being replaced.
“I do agree, tons of Canadians are leaving,” said Cole Cummins, a real estate agent who moved from Toronto to Naples, Fla., several years ago.
“But there’s way more coming, in my opinion, than there are leaving.”
His clients include small business owners who are giving up on Canada, convinced Florida offers a better place to build wealth and pay less in tax.
“It’s not that they like Trump or dislike Mark Carney, or dislike Trudeau – or vice versa. It’s more that the policies just cater to them a bit better,” he said.
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Among those still working to move to the U.S. is Safa Ahmed, a real estate agent who lives just outside Hamilton. She has applied for an immigrant visa for unskilled workers. She expects processing to take four or five years.
Life in Canada has gotten too expensive, she says. She believes the U.S. offers better affordability. She wants “a permanent solution, where I can just start a new life,” she said.
In Arizona, too, Canadian investors have come down in new numbers. Former Vancouver Canucks goaltender Eddie Läck, who is now a real estate agent and homebuilder in the Phoenix area, counts a half-dozen Canadian clients who are buying property to develop and sell.
The time to build and the return margins “are impossible to get in Canada right now,” he said.
“The people that I talk to believe a whole lot more in the future of the U.S. economy compared to the Canadian, and that’s why they’re moving money down here,” he added.
At the same time, some Canadians are reconsidering their decision to pull out, especially with cold temperatures ahead, he said. “We’ve had multiple conversations with people that want to pull their listings, and come back down and use their place.”