Foreign Buyers of Residential Real Estate Are Once Again in the Sights of Canadian Political Parties. It’s a Red Herring.
Issues of housing costs and housing supply dominated conversations leading up to the recent federal election in September. And within these areas of focus, multiple parties presented positions on foreign buyers and owners of residential real estate in Canada. The current minority government, specifically, has indicated that it may aim to ban foreign buyers for a period of two years.
To be sure, this is low-hanging political fruit, but its effect is likely to be minimal to nil. In Metro Vancouver (and other parts of BC) and in Greater Toronto there already exists a foreign buyer tax. The fact that a ban would eliminate the hundreds of millions of dollars the respective provincial governments collect in foreign buyer taxes notwithstanding, the data for Metro Vancouver show that only 1.2% of purchasers are foreign buyers. A ban on these few-hundred purchasers will not significantly impact the market from an affordability and availability perspective.
Read the full rennie landscape - Fall 2021 here. Twice a year, rennie intelligence produces the rennie landscape , that tracks a variety of demographic and economic indicators that directly and indirectly influence our housing market here in Metro Vancouver. Our goal is to provide our community with a basis for evaluating the trajectory of the factors that collectively define the context for the real estate market.
