Canada's western province of British Columbia has rolled out a series of policies targeting foreign buyers since June in an attempt to cool the real estate market.

Chinese business insiders have explained the effectiveness of the policies and say Chinese immigrants are not the main drive for the high housing.

CRI's Victor Ning has more.

The new policies require foreign buyers to register and provide a certificate of tax payment before purchase.

It also includes an additional property transfer tax of 15 percent of the total price for foreigners who buy real estate in the Greater Vancouver area, which came into effect on Aug. 2, just eight days after its announcement.

Chinese business insiders say a low interest rate policy partly leads to the demand in real estate in Canada.

And the Demand is continuing to outstrip supply, driving up housing prices in metropolises such as Vancouver and Toronto.

Xue Bing is Chinese consul general in Toronto.

"Canada's central bank has long been implementing a low interest rate policy, which brings down the cost of financing for ordinary people. In this situation, buying real estate becomes a good way for locals to maintain or increase the value of their assets. On the other hand, there is an imbalance between the supply and demand where the supply falls short of demand."

Meanwhile, reports suggest that the Canadian government has been reducing the area of new land for real estate development in recent years.

Project director at Summerview House and Building Service Ltd. in Toronto Zhang Xiajing says limited land resources also lead to high housing prices.

"The developers who want to develop real estate in new land will have to compete for limited land resources. Therefore, the cost of the land will be very expensive."

Canada has a large population of immigrants and statistics show that over 80 percent of the immigrants choose to live in Toronto or Vancouver.

But Zhang Xiajing says Chinese immigrants are not a major part of them.

"The continuous entry of new immigrants to the country has brought rigid demand that pushes up housing prices. But looking at the composition of the immigrants as is shown by the immigration data, we can see that the number of Chinese immigrants ranked No. 1 among the 200,000 immigrants to the country a dozen years ago. But today the number of Chinese immigrants is quite small compared to that from other countries. So from this point of view, Chinese immigrants are not the main drive for the price hike."