Good symbolic act, but as the fine article states, it’s unlikely to have material effect on housing affordability for the average person until supply is increased.
Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#12A better title would be “absentee foreigners.” I think this is part of Airbnb blowback to some extent. Are these people really competing for even middle class housing? Seems weird to me. A few wealthy foreigners pipping millionaire Canadians for penthouses doesn’t really seem like a problem for normies. Am I understanding this wrong?
Portugal is also de facto eliminating its “golden visa” which basically lets you be an absentee owner with residence, but it’s still easy to move there if you want to you know actually live there.
Some countries are embracing this. Costa Rica just lowered its residence through real estate threshold to 150k USD.
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I didn’t follow the news closely, this seems to have come from the Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets. City level laws might have been tried but they lack teeth. This issue is also leading towards a vacancy survey and tax for vacant houses to provide material to escalate (I feel) if necessary. And worldwide, people might want cheaper housing but they din’t want their own house value to decline. The forme…
> seems to lie deep in the lizard brain Wanting an asset you purchased on 10 times leverage, with a 5% interest rate on the debt to decline in value would be total and utter insanity.
Yup. You made my implicit contradiction explicit.
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#14In Spain they'll give a residency permit to foreigners buying a home over 500k euros.
Costa Rica it’s $150,000 US and they just lowered it in 2021 from 200. Portugal also has/had a similar setup, but it seems gridlocked by the bureaucracy. I thought Canada actually had a similar law several years back, but maybe not. There are easier ways to get residency in Portugal and Spain, the difference is these let you be absentee 90% of the time. This Canadian law is typical of left-isolationism as opposed to…
Eligible applicants must invest CAD $350,000 into a Canadian “authorized designated organization”. Accredited investors must also demonstrate their net worth with an income of at least $200,000 or proof of $1,000,000 of financial assets
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#15So if you're the stereotypical rich foreigner who wants to invest in real estate here, what's the stop them from incorporating a company locally, and then having that own the house(s)? And that's just one workaround I can think of in the first 30 seconds. As with all well-intentioned simplistic schemes, this will hurt normal folks - immigrants who don't have their paperwork sorted out yet - and do absolutely nothing…
> and do absolutely nothing to the big $$ driving home prices up Are the price rises because 1 person bought a penthouse for $100mil or because a million 'normal' people outbid each other for the 100k house in the suburbs?
Or perhaps because one corporation is outbidding a million normal people for 100k homes?
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#16So if you're the stereotypical rich foreigner who wants to invest in real estate here, what's the stop them from incorporating a company locally, and then having that own the house(s)? And that's just one workaround I can think of in the first 30 seconds. As with all well-intentioned simplistic schemes, this will hurt normal folks - immigrants who don't have their paperwork sorted out yet - and do absolutely nothing…
Well, there are fines for helping bypass the laws.
"The Act has a $10,000 fine for any non-Canadian or anyone who knowingly assists a non-Canadian and is convicted of violating the Act. If a court finds that a non-Canadian has done this, they may order the sale of the house."
I would assume opening a numbered corp to own the house would fall under this category?
Most of the "super-rich" owned houses in Canada are already owned by corporations to leverage the protections corps have.
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#17In Spain they'll give a residency permit to foreigners buying a home over 500k euros.
This is where Canada's new law gets really weird.
We also have an "investment" class visa and almost everyone who has used this bought a house to meet the "minimum requirements"
https://www.cic.gc.ca/english/helpcentre/answer.asp?qnum=653...
So.. earlier they encouraged foreigners to buy houses in order to get PR cards, now they ban it??
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#18Killing the golden goose?
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#19Good symbolic act, but as the fine article states, it’s unlikely to have material effect on housing affordability for the average person until supply is increased.
Exactly. This is only attracting foreign interest due to th artificially constrained supply. If they were serious about the issue, they would increase supply.
Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes
#20So if you're the stereotypical rich foreigner who wants to invest in real estate here, what's the stop them from incorporating a company locally, and then having that own the house(s)? And that's just one workaround I can think of in the first 30 seconds. As with all well-intentioned simplistic schemes, this will hurt normal folks - immigrants who don't have their paperwork sorted out yet - and do absolutely nothing…
Well, there are fines for helping bypass the laws. "The Act has a $10,000 fine for any non-Canadian or anyone who knowingly assists a non-Canadian and is convicted of violating the Act. If a court finds that a non-Canadian has done this, they may order the sale of the house." I would assume opening a numbered corp to own the house would fall under this category? Most of the "super-rich" owned houses in Canada are alr…
Seems like that will just drive the foreign super rich to ‘buy’ citizenships too. With enough money and in-country fixers/ lobbyists, that’s usually not unobtainable in most countries.