211–220 of 817 posts
Where will Chinese/Russian/Saudi millionaires and billionaires now offshore their wealth if they can't do it in Canadian real estate?
Banning them won't stop local Canadians with access to literally free debt to leverage their real estate portfolios and rental properties.
Neither will their investments in REIT companies that snap up new properties to flip them to those groups.
> During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home. This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of th…
You're fighting scarcity. You still won't win the bidding war - it just won't be as one-sided. Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically. While yo…
Likewise if you dont know who you're bidding against, how do you even know the bidder is even real (foreign or not)? Transparency is good thing.
While there may be some "scarcity" not having full transparency and realtors not in alignment with their own clients needs is a step in the right direction.
(I use scare quotes here because while I know we're not building enough but the current market has a fair share of retail speculation, institutional investors inflating prices, and homes held as purely places to mark money(non-owner occupied). Scarcity is real and building does need to happen, but thats slow and expensive. Millions of homes are kept empty or as poor speculative investments and thats a problem)
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It’s treating basic human needs as financial instruments.
How does your theory explain the difference in housing prices between San Francisco and Lubbock?
This isn’t a matter of supply and demand, of investors taking 80% of all new houses, of foreigners laundering money, or of NIMBYs. These are all red herrings. These are all secondary effects of a bigger problem. These are all ways to ignore the real problem.
No amount of policy will slash house prices in Toronto by half, and no policy will double your income to match the increasing prices.
I suggest you stop looking for policies, because by the time any of them take effect and reverb through society, long enough time would have passed that you’d spend your whole life renting and paying off someone else’s mortgage anyway.
Now ask yourself if that’s the future you want, and act accordingly.
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I think people are missing the fact that for many Canadians values of their homes represent their live savings. So while homeownership remains high in Canada doing something substantial about re prices would ruin peoples lives.
Actually no, because you still need a place to live. So it doesn't really matter if your home is worth $!M or $100K because it would cost you the same to move somewhere else. As such reducing home prices across the board isn't that problematic, because there's no loss in 'value'. You can still sell your apartment in Vancouver and buy a 5-bedroom in Saskatoon. The issue becomes people with existing outstanding mortgag…
good first step, but now ban corporate landlords if you're really serious.
Obviously the property market isn't functioning like a free market, but why do you think that having more private landlords would make things better?
Do you just want a limit on the share of the property market in a given location that one entity can own? That would definitely make sense.
The foreign-buyer ban won’t apply to students, foreign workers or foreign citizens who are permanent residents of Canada, the person said.
They did this stunt here in New Zealand too, where "foreigners" excluded Australian Citizens, Singaporean citizens, and permanent residents.
Anyway, prepare for the media (and public, because the media determines how we talk) to use the term "foreign buyer ban" forever.
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In the case of real estate, the entrenched transaction businesses control both supply and demand, and hence are more able to block new entrants. In the case of Uber, supply (people who own vehicles) was effectively unlimited and independent.
Uber is an interesting comparison, because their primary competitive strategy was to ignore existing government regulations. Regulations, of course, are a huge issue in the real estate industry. Maybe someone can step in and invest a many billions of dollars in real estate -- while ignoring the red-tape regulations that often prevent building? This seems unlikely, but could certainly be a path towards disruption. The…
Real Estate isn't a regulatory trap; it's an information trap. You can buy and sell property direct. All of the legal stuff is (nominally) done by attorneys. But the association of realtors controls the listing service and makes discovery easy.
Like all salespeople, realtors add "value". When you've been in 2,000 houses, you pick up insights that are useful and learn about neighborhoods. The information is used for both good and bad purposes.
Most of the disruptors do stupid shit with stupid investor money or integrate with the existing players and add some value.
Good. The way countries allow the ultra-wealthy to park money in real estate and pay almost no taxes on it while it drives up the price of a necessary resource for everyone else has to stop. Period. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a ban per se. I'd prefer to see that owning a property anyywhere allows that jurisdiction to tax your worldwide income and assets of the beneficial owner as if they were a resident. Dou…
You want to ban REITs, institutional money and local landlords with access to near 0% debt buying up and flipping homes. The average immigrant that buys homes from them aren't here to start a portfolio, they can't
By your argument, New Iroquais should be owned by the original people that lived there.
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Real estate is always a good investment (unfortunately), and capital flight from Asia is not a joke. It's happening in Europe too. Personally, I think governments in well developed countries should do their best to dissuade investment in housing as a financial instrument. Why should I compete with a millionaire, be it local or foreign, for a decent house to live in a city I've lived in for years?
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Due to history and geography, in Vancouver's case it's largely money from Hong Kong, Mainland China and the United States.
For London for example, it's from Russia and other places.
Money from Asia is being referenced because it's a concrete example.