A disaster for people who believe Canadian citizens and permanent residents should be able to afford to buy a home in their own city.
Great for those who own real estate and sell it.
Great for those who own real estate and sell it.
> Foreign investors will have to pay an additional 15 percent in property-transfer tax as of Aug. 2 and city of Vancouver was given the authority to impose a new tax on empty homes.
The additional tax on foreign investors is a good idea, but I wonder how it will be enforced, especially when ownership is often hidden behind trusts.
Technically, it is a British Columbia provincial tax which applies only in the metro Vancouver area. I am curious to see what, if any, affect it has.
I wonder how they will actually enforce this. I mean, one can furnish a home, have utilities remain active and leave a few lights on and make it look like someone is actually living there. Add some random noise generation (pretty easy to set up with home automation or other, similar methods) and you can fool basically anyone who isn't actively watching your door 24/7.
How easy is it to fool a surveillance camera pointed at your door 24/7 with an automated system trained to detect human movement watching it?
For example, it very narrowly targets foreign citizens who are not permanent residents or citizens of Canada, completely missing "investors" who have just bought Canadian permanent residence for cheap, do not earn income in Canada, and are now buying property in their safe haven. This scenario is unfortunately all too common.
About $100K in interest payments via Quebec's investor immigration program, no other requirements.
The foreign investor tax is a low-effort attempt to skate through another election and maybe pick up a few bucks on the other side.
An actual solution to this problem will involve cooperation between the province and the feds at the very least to handle Canada's lax money laundering laws and the Quebec immigrant investor program, as other posters have said. And you are correct in that there have already been realtors caught and censured in BC for offering to help their clients sidestep this new tax using a white proxy buyer or a cut-out trust.
However, an actual solution is likely to also tank real estate values, which is reasonable when you think about how the average single detached home in Van is selling for a huge multiple of average wage.