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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#231

Post by fatbird »

bamboozled wrote: post #213
fatbird wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada, the vast majority of rich foreigners buying property are American. Chinese investors, the favourite villain of the "rich foreigners" class, make up only about 4% of foreign real estate investment.

It would be funny though, if you were trying to say that Chinese foreign ownership isn't a problem in places in the world, because I mean, it's absolutely smashed Sydney's housing prices. Not saying there's anything "wrong" with any ethnic group, but there are sources of money in this world and some are particularly more present than others. I don't know why but I'd say Chinese foreign ownership is much lower in the…

Yeah, I wasn't fully clear. I'm talking about Canada, where Chinese investment is only 4%, contrary to perception that "Chinese money" is the source of our troubles. 4% is still a significant impact, but it's pretty much pure racism that singles out the Chinese as the primary driver.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#232

Post by TrackerFF »

plantain wrote: post #140

I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https:…

Zoning laws limit where and what you can build.

Who sits on these boards, lobby, and vote on zoning regulations? Homeowners in the area.

The first thing that happens when a company announces a new building projects, is that they get deluged with protests from the neighboring homeowners. Sometimes this process will take years and years - there's no worse sin than taking away sunlight from neighbors, "visual pollution", and what have you.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#233

Post by dan-robertson »

fatbird wrote: post #220
dan-robertson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I’m in the position of the person in comment I replied to above: I look out of my window and see some empty apartments. Some time later, I write on hacker news that they were not for sale but held by foreigners as investments. Are you suggesting that, between these two steps, I would conveyance the sale of one of those apartments and thereby determine that it was bought as an investment property by a foreigne…

Conveyance is the act of transferring ownership, done by real estate lawyers. If you, as a foreign investor, bought before this law came in, then when you tried to sell it, your identity as a foreign investor could be noted, triggering a check of when you purchased it with respect to this law. but the point here isn't to look around and find all the foreign investor owned properties. It's that investments are bought…

Sorry, I don’t understand the relevance of this to the question above. Maybe I wasn’t clear. Let me try to rephrase that question:

Above, 'PragmaticPulp wrote that:

> I visited a friend who lived in a high rise and barely saw anyone else come and go from the building the entire week I was there. From the windows we could see into other nearby high rises, most of which were empty. Empty not because they were for sale, but because they had been purchased as investment vehicles by foreign investors who had no intention of ever living there.

And my question is how they knew that those apartments were empty because they were owned by some foreign investor (who presumably also wasn’t interested in making money on rent)?

I don’t understand how rules about conveyancing answer that question.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#234

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kennend3 wrote: post #16
MarkusWandel wrote: post #3

So 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…

> there are fines for helping bypass the laws

The law doesn't seem to consider Canadian entities to be non-Canadian. Buying through a local entity thus isn't bypassing the law, but following it.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#235

Post by revolvingocelot »

betaby wrote: post #96
verdenti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian, Canada needs way more people for how much habitable land we have.

We don't have 'much habitable land'. Most of the 'land' is literally a rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

Don't forget muskeg!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#236

Post by acyou »

screye wrote: post #212

I don't blame Canada. The country is running out of space really fast and they lack the technology to build more than 1 floor of house. Unlike massive countries like South Korea, they can't fit 50 million people. Can you imagine being forced to live in slum like conditions without a half-acre yard or at least 3 parking spots? We are a developed country, do you expect us to park on the streets like the 3rd world ? If…

Would you be able to please expand on this and explicitly say what you want to say?

Wondering what you mean by "sprawly nations".

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#237

Post by themagician »

plantain wrote: post #140

I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https:…

There are a lot of answers, but they all stem from one core answer: Because governments do not want to fix it, because those with wealth (largely) do not see it as a problem.

Three generations of people (silent, boomers, and gen x) were told that real estate was the best investment they could make for their ENTIRE LIFE. Millennials also heard this growing up.

In the US we even took extra steps to make sure that homeownership was "the thing". We created non-market solutions (the 30yr mortgage via Fannie & Freddie) that made homeownership available to every American, and then kept going and essentially turned homeownership into the forced savings and retirement program.

Now, *decades* later, home values must go up. They must go up always and forever. The entire world economy revolves on the appreciation of homes in highly developed countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. People with homes need those homes to go up in value or they can't borrow against them. They can't retire. Governments need the value of homes to go up for tax revenue.

The entire world monetary system, as least as it relates to the dollar, pound and euro needs homes to continue to appreciate and the easiest way to do that is by limiting the supply of homes.

If someone waved some magic wand tomorrow that removed all building restrictions and made it so people could easily build homes, and those homes would be sold at market rates, average home values would plummet and global markets would collapse.

The only "solution" that is ever going to actually happen is more government subsidization. Longer loans. More federal guarantees. More federal tax credits.

Home values must go up. Supply must be kept scarce. Our system is built on this.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#239

Post by dan-robertson »

acchow wrote: post #226
dan-robertson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14.1M occupied private dwellings[1] 39M Canadians[2] Looks like there isn’t enough property to go round. Maybe the problem is that people want to live in places where they get paid, and not share with parents/roommates and they’re competing to occupy dwellings where there aren’t enough? But what do I know? I just wrote down some numbers that aren’t equal. [1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/…

Are you aiming for each dwelling to be occupied by only 1 person?

I’m responding to a comment that wrote:

> 1 person - 1 property

Maybe it isn’t clear, but I don’t agree with the comment.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#240

Post by betaby »

cameronh90 wrote: post #218
betaby wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That land is not suitable for agriculture. There is no way to build anything sustainable there, nor there is any point in that.

Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away. I'd imagine a bigger issue with inhabiting that area is lack of logistics.

> Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

And that's precisely the problem! Carbon footprint per capital is very high in Canada and for remote and colder locations it would be even higher!

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