Can’t WAIT! Zillow keeps telling me that my West LA house is getting so pricey! But I live there and I’m not selling, so it’s imaginary money. All it does is encourage the building of grotesque McMansions. Besides, I’ve been wanting property in Canada for a while, so this would be great for me.
2 Likes
Why? Did you buy it as an investment or as a place to live? If the former, you’re part of the problem. If the latter, devaluation helps you, as it will lower your property tax burden.
How is it more profitable for the investor to have a house sitting empty than bringing in rental income?
Nobody “loses” their home because it loses value, they choose to dump it. If your house was worth (to you) what you paid for it when you took out the mortgage, it should still be worth that to you tomorrow regardless of what Zillow or the assessor says. It’s the same house. It doesn’t start falling apart out of despair, and presumably you didn’t buy it for the prestige of its overinflated price.
4 Likes
We best be workin’ on those hoodoo pro$perity spells! I have a real estate lawyer friend up there!
1 Like
Normal cities have rental vacancy rates of 2.5%. Vancouver has a rental vacancy rate of 0.5%, with rentals nearly 2000/month for a 2 bedroom, and a terrifyingly frequent likelyhood of people getting reno-victed (owner evicts family, does “renovation” and then charges next family an extra 500-1000$ more in monthly rent.)
A recent study of the bc hydro usage patterns showed that something like 10500 empty condo or properties are completely unused. This was the study that pushed the BC Liberal party to implement the (long delayed) 15% foreign buyers tax. This indicates that these properties alone are owned by foreign buyers who are NOT RENTING TO PEOPLE. Not even renters. This does not even count/track foreign buyers who own property but are renting it.
Countries should track the citizenship of who owns a property in their country, if only for valid census data. BC stopped doing that years ago, which led to this sort of corruption.
Given that the power study alone indicated a lot of vacant home spaces, and any proposal to use electricity usage data to track empty homes can be defeated by having an oven or a dishwasher hooked up to a timer, the only real remedy is to track the citizenship of property owners.
Vancouver/BC should have a policy where only BC citizens and BC residents (who are residents atleast 9 months out of the year or have a spouse living in the home for that sortbof time) are only charged regular property taxes. Everyone else should get classified as a foreign real estate speculator and charged 20% ANNUAL property taxes.
6 Likes
Jamaica has a policy in place where only 15% of all Jamaican properties can beowned by foreign buyers.
You went through it 7 years ago. Canadians consider themselves civilized because the crash didn’t happen here.* Though, the truth is that everything in the states happens in Canada too, just 10 years later.
* Well…it happened in Alberta, but that’s really just Texas North.
3 Likes
If not the citizenship, then at least the Residency. I don’t mind where property owners are from so much as where they’re spending their time (for instance, if they’re not spending it in Canada, and thus, not anywhere near the property that they own).
2 Likes
The first time we ever bought a house was in Toronto, and less than two years later, I got a job offer on the other side of the country. So we sold the house. At that time, we were quite lucky, because the house had increased in value by enough to mostly cover the realtor’s costs. In the 13 years since then, we’ve changed cities two more times. We’re planning to stay in Montreal for the foreseeable future, but I work in a volatile and unpredictable industry.
The fact that you live in a house doesn’t make it any less of an investment. It might not be an investment that you’re planning to cash out any time soon, but sometimes what you plan and what happens end up being quite different.
Agreed. You’d think people would make the connection, but alas.
2 Likes
Can you define this?
No, it’s going to happen down here again. We didn’t fix any of the problems, just propped things up long enough to gain back investor confidence. We still have shitty F tranches bundled up and sold as AAA ratings.
2 Likes
Yes. According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) the average vacancy in the top 34 Canadian cities is between 3.3% to 3.4% as of November 2016.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/corp/nero/nere/2016/2016-11-28-0815.cfm
China’s middle class can afford to buy condos in Vancouver? Not even San Francisco’s middle class is that wealthy.
2 Likes
They buy condos and let them sit empty… the most annoying thing is that the only way they were found out was by reading the power meter consumption to figure out just how many houses and condos were sitting empty while the rental vacancy rate was below 0.5% (more than 10% of all of Vancouver’s condominiums are empty). The government used to track these statistics…
2 Likes
So you mean normal in terms of this specific issue? Okay, thanks for clarifying what you meant for me.
2 Likes
I don’t enjoy it, but I’m fine with people losing their homes. They would have been more than happy to take an absurd 20% a year increase in value while overextending themselves because they saw playing the real estate game as not just living, but investing. When investing sometimes you lose your shirt. You buy the wrong thing based on bad information (or hey, no information at all!), your investment tanks and there’s no one to hold your hand on your way to bankruptcy. They were the same people driving housing costs to the fucking moon, so lie in the bed you made.
You do realize that the vast majority of people who got caught up in the 2008 crash and lost their homes weren’t “investing” but were, you know, trying to have a home. the people who lost their homes were not the people driving up costs. The people who created the mess were not the ones losing their homes.
[ETA] Some links:
None of these people caused the crisis. None of them deserved to lose their homes and be out on the street.
4 Likes
Why’d they buy? Why didn’t they rent? Where’s personal responsibility in all this?
Because there was a strong push for home ownership since the 1950s. Because there was an opportunity to do so and having a patch of land of one’s own means having something that is yours that one can pass on to one’s children. Because they were offered the opportunity to do so. Because renting on the margins can be a an insecure way to live and people want and need security in their lives.
The people who drove the economy in the ditch were not the ones who lost their homes. They are the victims, more often than not, of predatory lending practices that exploited their precarious financial lives in order for a few people at the top of the food chain to get richer.
By blaming the people who lost their homes, moreover, you are doing exactly what they want you to do, which is the blame the people being victimized as opposed to the people who committed fraud and got away with it.
8 Likes
This is a very poignant question, though the irresponsibility and failure to hold those responsible accountable isn’t what you imagine at all.
2 Likes
