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Originally Posted by Changing City
Not sure where you get "about 10% of transactions in more recent years have been made by foreign investors", but foreign investors haven't been allowed to buy property in Canada since 2023, and that's been extended until 2027. An FOI request by Global News revealed that the ban was only expected to impact 2% of propery sales, as foreign investment had already fallen due to vacant homes taxes. And "The latest available home ownership data via Statistics Canada shows 2.6 per cent of Toronto’s housing stock and 4.3 per cent of Vancouver’s were owned by non-residents as of 2021." So they really shouldn't have the impact on the market that you suggest.
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I've seen all sorts of figures for the rate of foreign buyers in a given year, from as low as 5% to as much as 20 to 30%. Consistent, accurate data is hard to come by, but the 10% figure was cited from here:
https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/for...0still%20local.
That would also make sense if 4-5% of all properties are foreign-owned, as obviously not all properties are on the market at any given time. And foreign investment in Vancouver RE really only started in earnest in the 90s, and then picked up in the 00s and 10s, before tapering off somewhat more recently - though, not entirely; as the supposed "ban" on foreign buyers
still has enough loopholes as to make it possible to bypass.
In any case, I wouldn't argue that foreign investors are the main cause of Vancouver’s distorted housing price to income ratio, but it's hard to deny that they've played a role. The state of our housing market is ultimately a "death by a thousand cuts" type situation, after all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
I left Vancouver in 1998 on account of the exorbitant housing prices. After four years of managing a business with 150 employees, I still could not scrape together enough money for a down payment on a modest condominium. Goddamned Trudeau, it was all his fault.
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Not sure what your point is beyond being a strawman, but the average home price in Metro Vancouver in 1998 was around $220,000 ($382,000 in today's dollars).
More expensive than the rest of the country at the time to be sure, but a far cry from today's average price of $1,211,700. Needless to say incomes haven't also tripled in that time. Today's pricing is also quite a far cry from the 2015 average of $761,000.
Trudeau Jr.'s policies didn't make Vancouver expensive, but they sure accelerated it.