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Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

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261–270 of 817 posts

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#261

> 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…

> 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.

I'm all for building more houses in cities/high demand areas, but doesn't Canada only have a population growth rate of around 1%/yr? It seems like you could easily build your way past that without giving up the advantages of immigration and a little population growth.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#262
post #11

Why not just have occupancy requirements / vacancy tax?

BC/Vancouver did this. Wasn't a silver bullet that made housing affordable overnight, but it add thousands of units to the market and there's evidence that it influenced the sort of housing that developers built more toward apartments for renters.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#263

> 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…

>This is such a huge deal. Is it though? I chatted with someone from Australia which has open bidding and you know what .. houses still went way over reserve. At the end of the day, if you have 20+ offers on a house, you're not getting that house without destroying your budget, no matter how you set up the bid system. The common sense change I wanted to see implemented was to prevent the waiving of a home inspection…

It is because Realtors are crooks. That's about it. We also had to tack down assignment clauses so that realtors wouldn't re-sell their client's houses for more and pocket the difference.

I also want to see mandatory home inspection, seems common sense.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#264
post #159

I live in metro Vancouver. The market is stupid right now (has been for years I guess). Its fairly common for houses to sell 200-400K over asking price, with sometimes one or two dozen offers. Also as the article says, this is just a bandaid, won't fix things. How about ending the bizarre zoning restrictions that result in a sea of SFHs with little islands of super highrise condos around transit hubs? Maybe that woul…

https://shapeyourcity.ca/vancouver-plan

They're trying to fix it, please join in the discussions and open houses... too many NIMBYs with free time available are participating.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#265
post #59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, I know the left likes to blame the rich, but I’ve never seen specifically rich foreigners. Also for real how can the voters (ie the average citizen) be the problem? The average citizen has no money and no political or regulatory power. The average citizen just exists in a system they have no control over and responds to incentives. Hoping that en mass people won’t do that is like politely asking a river to mov…

Attacking rich foreigners for not paying enough to their adopted homes is fairly common throughout the world, no? America does make it harder to avoid paying tax with a system that taxes income regardless of which country you earned it in, but most of the rest of the world does not work this way. To use the UK as an example, attacking rich foreigners for their "non-domiciled" tax status is extremely common. This is w…

People were being taxed 90% income tax when this shift happened in the 70s.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#267
Landlords are the biggest issue.

Where else can you buy a house for $x/mo , slap a rental on it for $1.5x/mo , and keep .5x/mo AND get equity?

That's a fucking scam no matter how you look at it. And they're adding in NOTHING to the economy. They're parasites that inject themselves on reasonable costing houses and arbitrarily inflate them for their own profit.

And who's predominantly doing this scam? Boomers are. They're the ones who have access to this kind of money and equity.

And who's getting screwed? Millenials and GenZ are.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#268
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the 70% ownership stat include those living with their parents? I have friends at 30 who still live with their parents.

Those kids will get that house passed down to them.

Literally my brother's retirement plan. Good luck to anyone who doesn't have a well off family!

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#269
post #28
post #8

This is nothing but pandering for votes before an election for those who don't understand this won't have any significant impact on affordability of houses for Canadians. There's a reason why we still also pay the highest telecommunications bills in the world - industrial complexes have captured our government, and even it's far worse that that; regulatory capture. Edit to add: 3 points down to 0 points; downvotes ar…

I know this is probably naive thinking but I don't understand how we can have so much land and still have unaffordable homes and concentrated populations.

Most of the land is useless and completely unviable for building anything. Seriously.

Almost all of British Columbia is mountain. We flooded many of the river valleys for hydro power in the 1950s. Can't build on the side of the mountain that easy.

Huge swathes of Canada are muskeg bog and tundra. etc.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most common scenario is to sell your Toronto home for 2m and retire to a 500k condo in Florida. And no, neither banks nor government would absorb the delta between mortgage value and current property evaluation. Banks are probably covered by some form of government insurance which people would have to pay up through taxes

There is another option. I believe Japan went through it in the 90s. So lets follow their example and do nothing about the real estate bubble too.
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