International Migration, Housing Demand Measurement, and Vancouver New-House Price Forecasting

This paper constructs a reproducible measure of occupied-dwelling use associated with international migration and asks whether the measure improves forecasts of Statistics Canada’s Vancouver New Housing Price Index. We combine annual population components for 41 census metropolitan areas over 2002–2024 with national status- and tenure-specific housing-use rates. The accounting applies a nationally calibrated reconciliation of temporary-to-permanent transitions instead of treating them as new external arrivals, and expresses the resulting flow per 1,000 occupied dwellings. We conduct a release-delay-safe, current-vintage pseudo-real-time quarterly evaluation and a retrospective annual expanding-origin comparison. An exploratory extension evaluates realized-future information diagnostics, a 19-feature monthly leading layer, horizon-specific cross-CMA partial pooling, strictly historical-error forecast combinations, and a two-hidden-layer tanh neural network. On 102 common Vancouver origins, the exponential-weight combination has four-quarter MAE 2.826 versus 3.256 for the random walk, a 13.2% reduction, but the paired Newey–West comparison is imprecise (p = .224). At eight quarters its MAE is 6.146, worse than the random walk’s 5.736. Neural MAEs are 0.907, 3.392, and 6.560 at one, four, and eight quarters; none improves on both benchmark criteria. A separate reconstruction from exact Statistics Canada The Daily releases produces 585 historical-first-release retrospective forecasts. At one quarter, AR(4)-direct MAE is 0.781 percentage points versus 0.887 for the random walk on 51 origins; the candidate-minus-random-walk descriptive interval [-0.283, 0.071] crosses zero. In the annual metropolitan-area exercise, the composition-adjusted central sensitivity likewise fails its incremental-value criterion against both the pooled base and raw total population flow in every evaluation set. A secondary purpose-built-rental exercise also fails its incremental-information criterion for both rental outcomes. The evidence therefore separates accounting coherence from incremental predictive value. The results concern new-house prices and predictive association; they do not identify a causal policy effect or establish prospective forecast superiority.