61–70 of 80 posts
The province could pass a law that allowing them to seize the assets of a foreign owner who does not occupy or rent their residence. Have this law apply to companies that hold single-family residence as well. If it passes legal muster, the threat of losing your property is probably enough to dissuade a lot of foreign investors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bubble is a more complex phenomenon than large price increases. A bubble is inflated by speculation that isn't rooted in anything except the rising price. If rich foreigners are buying property to summer in because they like the weather, then not a bubble. If rich foreigners are buying property because the property has gained X% in price every year for the last ten years but they don't know anything about the speci…
A bubble is inflated by speculation that isn't rooted in anything except the rising price. It's been like that for the last 8+ years.
I'm sure there is speculation going on in the market, but we can't tell to what degree without polling the people buying real estate.
The province could pass a law that allowing them to seize the assets of a foreign owner who does not occupy or rent their residence. Have this law apply to companies that hold single-family residence as well. If it passes legal muster, the threat of losing your property is probably enough to dissuade a lot of foreign investors.
Wouldn't that also harm anyone with a vacation property?
The good thing is this kind of law can be adjudicated, unlike the tax. Because you can go before a judge/mediator and argue that you use the home as a residence.
The current tax scheme just hurts foreigners that live and work in Canada, not the people who buy up million dollar properties (which is exactly who the law intends to target).
I live in Canada and basically Vancouver, possibly the Canadian city with the nicest weather, is completely cut off to me. It's not even like Silicon Valley etc where there is an industry and you can find a job that pays better here, it's just completely too expensive. There was a website called something like "crack house or million dollar Vancouver home" because knock-down quality bungalows were selling for over a…
You could rent. Rental prices in Vancouver are fairly reasonable relative to purchase prices.
The Canadian housing market is currently in a bubble. The same can be said about the Australian housing market. Canada http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1100960/thumbs/o-BMO-HOUSE-PRICES-... http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/54aea0136da8118f2ae... Australia https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NuIUphAP17w/Vth6P3w2FzI/AAAAAAAAC... http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/images/stories/keenjan2.p...
(I posted this in a previous article.) You really should include a link to this as well- Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver MLS Home Price Index http://www.rebgv.org/home-price-index?region=all&type=all&da... This shows the the price trend of Detached, Townhouse, and Apartment up to the last 11 years, broken by individual cities in Greater Vancouver. But it is misleading. If you look at Metro Vancouver's trend, a…
If foreign investors are happily buying "overpriced" properties at huge premiums, why not simply build more?
Because you'll never build enough. Global demand surpasses potential local supply by a huge margin. Prices won't even begin to drop.
But some might say this will drive property prices down? Mission accomplished!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly what came to my mind. I saw this same behavior happening in 2005. When there is no marketable cash-flow producing use of investment property, you are in a bubble.
And the phenomenon is even worse now. If you sold a property in 2005 in Vancouver, I bet you wish you'd held on to it. As someone else said, it's only a bubble when it pops. Good luck timing that.
Wonder if San Francisco could do the same to these foreign real estate squatters.
The tax only really affects landed immigrants who live and work in BC, and foreign capital investments in new developments as the Chinese speculators with billions who want to park money in Vancouver have already found ways around it because they can deposit millions to set up national corporations and have it do all the land holding/flipping. For example my sister who has lived here 30yrs with American citizenship w…
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/ten-yea...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive me because I don't know how to blockquote here, this is the definition of "investment" from the agreement you linked: 1. “investment” means: (a) an enterprise; (b) shares, stocks and other forms of equity participation in an enterprise; (c) bonds, debentures, and other debt instruments of an enterprise; (d) a loan to an enterprise (i) where the enterprise is an affiliate of the investor, or (ii) where the ori…
First, please don't use fixed-width font to quote -- it makes users have to scroll horizontally to see it all. Second, I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems as a Canadian property investor, you could make your case with several items in the above list: (f) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner to share in the income or profits of the enterprise; (g) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner…
You're right that you could use (f) and (g) to sidestep, but an interest in an enterprise is something resembling equity. So yeah, set up a domestic shell corp, capitalize it, put your real estate in it, and that's probably good to go - I'm generalizing, but you're right. But being able to structure around a particular tax is not the same as the particular tax not applying or not existing. If for whatever Canadian legal reasons liability pierces the entity and goes back to the principals, you have a tax problem. I'm sure there are ways to structure around that as well, but again, I'm way out of my element on Canadian law.
As for (j) that's going to depend on whether Canadian law interprets "immovable property" as real property or not, and then what constitutes business purposes. I'll venture a guess that if a foreigner buys a home, assuming immovable property = real property for (j), and rents it out at market rates at arms length, that's okay. Buying it so their kids can live in it, or "renting" it to relatives or anything other than market rate and arms-length is probably less okay.
I also don't know enough about Canadian jurisprudence and the propensity to enforce the spirit of a law rather than the black letter. So basically I'm a dog pretending to be a Canadian lawyer on the internet. But those are the issues to me. It's certainly arguable from both positions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, please don't use fixed-width font to quote -- it makes users have to scroll horizontally to see it all. Second, I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems as a Canadian property investor, you could make your case with several items in the above list: (f) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner to share in the income or profits of the enterprise; (g) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner…
I cut and pasted from the reg and used 4 spaces on each line to indent. Let me know if there's a better way. You're right that you could use (f) and (g) to sidestep, but an interest in an enterprise is something resembling equity. So yeah, set up a domestic shell corp, capitalize it, put your real estate in it, and that's probably good to go - I'm generalizing, but you're right. But being able to structure around a p…
- Prefix each line with ">".
- Surround the quotation with triple quotes, like Python:
"""
My long quotation
"""
