This unsuspecting city is home to the hottest luxury market in the world

Victoria is the top luxury market in the world. Hey, if Christie’s International Real Estate says it, it must be true, though it’s hard to believe that Victoria, a city of 85,000 in the Canadian province of British Columbia, has topped the Big Apple, and even Hong Kong.

Here’s how it happened: Christie’s determined the hottest luxury market based on the number of sales, days on the market and price between 2016 and 2017. Once numbers were crunched, Victoria bested the world on the first two metrics, though its homes sold for the average price of $1.2 million–a bargain price, as Bloomberg reports, when compared to NYC’s typical luxury purchase of $3.6 million or Hong Kong’s $360 million.

But Victoria’s sales have increased by 29 percent and properties only spent an average of 32 days on the market. The buyers are mostly Chinese and American and they’re snapping up properties against the odds; a provincial tax, which can go up to 20 percent, was put in place in 2016 with the intention of cooling foreign investment, but so far the desired effect has yet to impact sales. [Bloomberg] — Erin Hudson