this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

All they need to do is make it so you can only own one residence, if you own a second as income property it should be taxed to the point that you want to sell it.

I was in the rental stream before and at least 1 landlord was foreign owners from mainland China--the property had sat empty for six months before us because owner was rich and didn't care about the 2k month they were losing. Another was an unlocatable landlord, the strara paperwork showed China owner, but correspondence was coming from Korean contact info. It started to look more like shell company ownership. Also have two friends who's Vancouver places are Asian owned. Owners moved back to China and main house was vacant for 2+ years, just single basement tennant paying utilities to make place "occupied".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

It would also be fun to have squatting laws like some other countries do. Vacant properties can be taken over (e.g. someone does a B&E then just starts living there) and if the "owner" doesn't notice soon enough they start losing their rights to the property. If you get mail at an address, if your stuff is there, if you are the one doing maintenance, all that counts in your favor as a resident. Even if your initial entry was aided by an angle grinder. In some cases actual ownership can end up transferred to the functional residence without any cost. The absentee owner loses their rights.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

This is a red herring.

I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That's only 1-2 years of new building stock.

It won't hurt to do it, but it's simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

extremely curious what such a calculation entails?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

I looked up the statscan data for home ownership and cross referenced it against other statscan data on rental buildings and locations of secondary homes(cottages and lake homes)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

We definitely need more housing across canada, but BC has been notorious for vacant homes and airbnb units, thus the ban on airbnb and the added vacancy tax out here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And it should be obvious that despite new regulations being put in for Foreign buyers, Vacant units, and Airbnb, the prices haven't dropped to even pre-pandemic levels, let alone any useful amount, and they're expected to keep climbing this year.

These are all small red herrings that are easy PR wins for the government, but don't actually do anything useful to the prices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They did drop for us in Vancouver. I'm not suggesting it accounts for the high prices everywhere but it definetly had a market affect as airbnb people dumped their additional units. One owner had over 40

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Or it just happened to coincide with a massive jump in interest rates which also affected prices elsewhere that didn't implement these policies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

No there are articles about the affect upon announcement and then institution

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

and yet if you go look at the charts for say Vancouver and Toronto over the same period of time you can clearly see there's little to no effect from BC's policy changes.

And it's still a couple million dollars to buy a detached home in Vancouver, and the cheapest 2 bedroom condo is a half million (and it's literally on East Hastings) with most normal 2 bedrooms being listed at $600-700k

These policies haven't made anything affordable, and they aren't going to make things affordable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

Oh they didn't make it affordable, I just meant we saw price drop in market and assessments. Prices here are ridiculous. We paid 415k for 2 bedroom apartment, now it is 575k but before the changes they were selling for 675k sight unseen, just buyers snapping them up

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

And thus many of those buyers moved to other Canadian cities and did the same thing as Vancouver.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

As someone who's trying to move back to Canada, I'm also reading that a lot of the places owned by these investors are basically useless boxes that no local would live in. So even if they got freed up, there'd be very little demand for them.