Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#341

Post by 88840-8855 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

rekabis wrote: post #320

Focusing on foreign buyers is a distractionary tactic. The primary cause of housing value spiking comes down to investors and speculators. Combat those, and the marketplace will return to sane valuations: • Speculation tax of 50% of the assessed or sold home value (whichever is greater) of any home held for less than two years, decreasing on a daily basis to 0% over years 3 through 8. Exemptions can be had due to ext…

I see you put a lot of thought into tag issue and yet, i much be that guy and tell you that it will just add a lot of bureaucracy and those who have resources and knowledge will be able to circumvent those restrictions.

And it does not solve the problems of:

- there is just too much cash out there

- land is limited. once it's gone, it's gone

- when you die, your kids get your house and land

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#342

Post by honkdaddy » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

hengri wrote: post #23

tqi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) Yeah the Right loves to blame poor foreigners while the Left prefers to blame rich foreigners but at the end of the day they at least agree that it is never the voters themselves who are to blame.

It's low interest rates to blame

It's a lack of supply caused by costly and overzealous environmental assessments which strangle the process of land development in Canada, particularly Ontario.

If you want a convenient scapegoat, blame the McGuinty government of the early 2000s. When the 2005 Greenbelt Act was passed, developers across the country warned of a housing crisis in the future due to the effect the bill would have on the price and timelines for new construction. 17 years later we'd prefer to blame China or NIMBYs, but the reality is Canadians, and especially Ontarians, did this to themselves when they allowed politicians and environmentalists to ignore the concerns of land developers and engineers.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#343

Post by hello_moto » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

georgeburdell wrote: post #315

The student exemption makes this decree useless. I live in the Bay Area and in my personal life cross paths with Mainland Chinese living their personal lives. I have more than once attended birthday parties at high-end houses that are sparsely furnished and inhabited except for a single “student”. As a non-affluent person, I don’t know if rich Americans do the same thing. However, enrolling your child in a Master’s p…

Limit ownership to only 1 property for international students and foreign workers.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#344

Post by rootusrootus » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #245

Element_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is dumb and will likely add fuel to the fire and the politicians know this. Canada has like a 68% home ownership rate meaning actually doing something to lower housing prices would be political suicide.

Yes, but crucially it's actually land that's valuable, not the housing that sits on it. The worry that allowing more density will tank home values is misguided. Land prices will keep going up as long as the land underneath the houses remains desirable. In fact, upzoning means more allowed uses, which means higher land values, which means more money for landowners. There are two implications of this: 1) NIMBYs need to…

> 2) YIMBYs need to realize that NIMBYs aren't exclusively motivated by greed. When they tell you that they don't want their neighborhood to densify they actually mean it. It's not covering for racism or greed. People genuinely don't want their neighborhoods to change.

In my experience this is almost 100% the real truth. I haven't met many people that are looking at their house price when they think about changes to the neighborhood. First consideration is usually traffic. Second consideration is character. In neighborhoods where almost everyone owns, they very much don't want to see it become a rental neighborhood.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#345

Post by rsync » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #316

rsync wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: you can waive your inspection contingency … and then still go inspect the house. Just bring your inspector along to a showing or open house, etc. Owners won’t even be there.

You're not going to be able to do a full inspection during an open house, the listing agent isn't going to let you climb on the roof, go into crawlspaces/attic, trip off all the GFCI breakers in the house, etc. What you're suggesting is called a "walk-and-talk" inspection, and is not going to find the high dollar problems a traditional inspection can find.

" ... the listing agent isn't going to let you climb on the roof, go into crawlspaces/attic ..."

I have done all of those things on home viewings / open houses. I've opened septic risers, started generators, tripped breakers ...

Nervous smiles were the worst responses I've ever gotten.

You, and your sibling poster, are correct though: a real, comprehensive inspection is hours long and no amount of brashness is going to bridge that gap - but there is a LOT you can do with 30 minutes of knowledgeable poking and prying. You don't need an hour to see if the sills are rotting or if there are no foundation anchors ... or if all the floor joists are swiss-cheesed up by 40 years of ad-hoc electrical and plumbing runs ...

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#346

Post by AzzieElbab » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

Valgrim wrote: post #321

AzzieElbab wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see. Assume I am a realtor, I earn outrageous commissions of 2.5%. Does it make sense for me to jack up price of 1M condo by say 15% above the market and spend a month trying to sell it or to lower the price by 10% below and possibly sell two similar properties in the same month?

But every house that is on the market IS being sold, even at outrageous price, because buyers don't believe the price hike will slow down anytime soon (why would they? this segment of the market is guaranteed to be protected by any government who wishes to get re-elected) So you, the realtor, will sell every house you got anyway, so why not bump the price while you're at it?

that is classic cause and effect. realtors are just tagging along. I bet even if they make realtors accept second highest price instead of first(aka google adds) the impact would be minimal overall

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#347

Post by toast0 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

boplicity wrote: post #99

______-_-______ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... it has to eventually. If my country has a population of 50 million and I build 800 million homes, will investors keep buying them all at above market rates (read: more than I spent building them)? Then I can build 100 million more and keep collecting infinite money?

This can go on longer than you think; it leads to "ghost cities" -- huge areas full of empty housing bought by speculators. https://allthatsinteresting.com/chinese-ghost-cities

It's a lot easier to build housing in the middle of nowhere USA; but there's not a large problem of ghost cities. There's certainly a lot of sprawl, but not large new construction ghost cities; although there was some overbuilding in some areas into the 2008 housing crash, and some areas where construction stalled or stopped mid-build as a result, since either the builder could no longer finance finishing or it didn't make economic sense to do so at that time. China has a lot of disconnected incentives that help it make economic sense for the participants to build and buy into a ghost city that I don't think are present in the US and Canada.

If ghost cities are a real concern, you could punitively tax vacant housing that's not offered for lease or sale, and limit housing starts when housing offered for sale or lease was above some threshold price. Or you could do something like a deposit per housing start, paid back over time to the owner or occupant while occupied.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#348

Post by ska » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

standeven wrote: post #313

CountSessine wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it so far fetched to assume some realtors may be juicing the bidding to... Of course not, and I didn't say that I'm completely against reforming the real estate industry and the bidding process. But it won't fix expensive housing. It's all bullsh*t if it doesn't address scarcity. In 2016 we had had 10 years of 2% population growth in Vancouver and 1.2% housing stock growth and we wanted to blame foreign investors,…

I agree that scarcity is the main issue, but how do you address it in a city like Vancouver? There’s no more land and downtown is dense. Make artificial islands? Deforest the mountainsides and build on 40 degree slopes? Replace local farms with subdivisions?

Unless things have changed radically since I was last there, downtown is mostly not dense.

But even if it were, it wouldn't solve the real problem in these north american cities, which is the "missing middle".

The model of small area of highly dense towers aimed at 20-something urbanites with no kids surrounded by spaced out single family homes with a yard is just fundamentally unworkable at any real scale.

If Vancouver wants to solve it's problem and not become a suburban/exurban sprawl (typical failure mode these days in north american growth) it's going to have to build a whole bunch of mid density housing near to downtown, and it's mostly going to have to build that on top of areas that are currently full of single family detached. This is not going to make current denizens of those "nice neighbourhoods" happy, naturally.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#349

Post by nemothekid » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

actuator wrote: post #277

nemothekid wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think these drive up prices higher. It's a demand-side policy to what is a supply-side problem. If the demand is already there, and you induce more demand by providing subsidies, prices will go up. If you want to reduce prices you must either increase supply (building housing) or decrease demand (remove someone, hopefully speculators, from the market). However, given housing has become a defacto investment…

> housing has become a defacto investment asset for Americans and Canadians Is there a major economy where this is not true? In fact it becomes comical in some developing countries. Cities in India have NY/London like prices for much worse infrastructure and much lower purchasing power.

Japan, Germany, arguably, Britain. I'm not saying these places don't have exorbitant housing costs, but housing is not the primary way of securing your retirement.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#350

Post by hello_moto » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #102

beebmam wrote: post #47

Why can't we increase property taxes for businesses that own homes? And, for individuals who own more than, let's say, two homes?

This is how Singapore addressed the housing crisis and I think it would be a great idea for Canada to follow suit. It levels the playing field between the 30 year old couple looking to start a family and massive REITs/corporations with billions in capital.

Singapore has a few ways to address housing crisis no?

HDB and a few restrictions on who can purchase it. etc.