Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly this. A significant portion of the housing is being bought by foreign investors who don't even live here. Not only is it raising the pricing of the housing, but you don't get the economic benefit of said wealthy individuals living in the city.

I recall reading an article about a local coffee shop. A number of new buildings were built around it, all residential condo's. The condo's in the buildings were completely sold out, hundreds of units, yet it was a ghost town around there. The coffee shop, and I believe a local pub as well, ended up going out of business because despite all the units being purchased, nobody actually lived in them.

Similar experience, my office is in the heart of downtown, right on the water. A beautiful building went up beside us, all condo's for sale, starting at $1.5 million. They got bought up instantly. However, once the building opened, I looked out my window and into a building where 90% of the units remained completely empty (no curtains) for well over a year until I switched desks. Foreign investors buy up all this property and it just sits there...empty. Meanwhile everyone that lives and works here is being priced out.

When the market tips all those foreign investors are going to try to unload their investment property at the same time. If I lived in a market like that I probably wouldn't buy anything even assuming I had the money. There's a big hangover at the end of this party.

This is all the dollars we blew out the trade deficit over the last 30 years coming home to roost. Those houses are essentially physical alternatives to treasury bills that pay zero interest or less with inflation.

A significant portion of the housing is being bought by foreign investors who don't even live here

What evidence is there that foreign ownership is a major problem? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but no actual data. I do know that Vancouver real estate agents are milking the "yellow peril" for all it's worth. "Buy now before China owns all of Vancouver!". Don't forget there is a ton of speculation going on by Canadian citizens as well.

Suffice to say, Canadians are doing what American's did in the early 2000's. They are going into a crazy amount of debt to buy housing, which is only pushing prices up even higher. Some of the stats make Canada look even worse than the US did at it's peak[1].

[1]http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

From the OP >> ...absentee foreign ownership and empty condos, which are said to account for nearly 25 per cent of units in certain neighbourhoods.

There are parts of Vancouver that are just dead. Rush hour now sees more carpenters and real estate agents commuting into these residential areas each morning than commute out. Places like the North Shore are essentially industrial zones manufacturing real estate prices. The people who live there (me) talk of empty neighborhoods populated only by retirees, every other house either under construction or sitting empty.

In the west end, it really is "yellow peril". I am asian myself, but I contribute to the economy as a job provider. Speculators are the reason for the impending ghost town that is Vancouver.

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpo...

The west end is the west part of downtown. You are talking about the west side, and in fact, not even the west side, but west of Alma, which is waaaay out there. Super west side.

This 'academic case study' you linked to is cited over and over however, no one really looks at the actual data in it, namely where the homes are. It's literally a tiny pocket, which has the most expensive homes in the whole city, so yes, it's primarily Asian buyers. Not that surprising.

Don't get me wrong - there is a real problem here but that study is repurposed over and over to show the extent of the problem and it's very misleading.

That is the worst "research" I think I've ever seen....

Chinese name? Foreigner!!! Despite Vancouver being almost 50% Asian.

Canada does not collect data on foreign ownership, and the citizenship of buyers in Yan’s study is not clear. But Yan established that 66 per cent of all buyers had “non-anglicized” Mainland China names.

From the slide deck:

Our full name analysis methodology follows accepted practices in the fields of epidemiology, demography, and political science. This study wanted to see if any distinct patterns occurring when non-Anglicized Chinese names are isolated from the rest of the data set. It is a primary assumption of this study that a non-Anglicized Chinese names may be an indication that an owner may be an recent immigrant to Canada and that an Anglicized Chinese name is an indication of a long time immigrant or non-immigrant and/or multigenerational Canadian of sole or mixed ethnic Chinese ancestry. As a course of experimentation, there may be names missed for new immigrants who have Anglicized Chinese names and long time immigrants or multi-generational Canadian with non-Anglicized Chinese name to may be in the wrong catagory, but, with external reviews, this risk is minimal.

Within this data set, the name patterns were exceptionally and surprisingly distinct as they lacked ambiguous names like “Scott Low” which could be a Chinese or Scottish name or “John Li” which could be Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean name. These names did not exist within this data set. Non-Anglicized Chinese names in the study were either in a three or two name sequences that our literature survey suggested were Chinese with no ambiguous names. Without direct measures of immigration or citizenship status and property ownership that are publicly available in Canada, this is an indirect measure of how globalization, non-localized wealth, and immigration, particularly from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan or Chinese global diaspora are entering one portion of the real estate market in Vancouver.

It's not perfect, but it's all we've got.

I guess the question is, have they run this methodology against a known sample?

It's anecdotal, but I know a number of US and Canadian citizens who have non-anglicized Chinese names. I would say most people who immigrate to Canada keep their original name. I also know a number of 1st generation Canadian who have Chinese names, but also English nicknames.

Today you learned!

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