In Australia if I recall correctly, foreign buyers are only able to buy newly built homes. Canada would benefit from a similar rule, it would stimulate more housing and not impact the demand for existing homes.
Absolutely depressing. The bit that weirded me out most was the post boxes. They were quite big, but about half of them were overflowing, which had to have been the result of a few years of accumulation at least.
If the buying price was 40-50% lower, I could save up for a deposit in a year or two, but the crazy house prices here in Australia are not getting any better at all. It also feels morally wrong to be investing at the cost of someone being able to afford a roof over their heads, so maybe renting it is for me.
Of course, the city also is going to be hosting the Olympics in a while, so that solidifies my moving away plans!
The reason I was told was:1) with crappy equity markets property is a safer investment, 2) not many questions about where the money comes from, 3) very low or non-existent property taxes (costs nothing to hold) and 4) as these countries get wealthier demand for housing only goes up.
In theory, yes, in reality the largest single residential purchase in the country was $35m and splashed all over the front page of newspapers.
It took them 5 years later to realise it was an illegal purchase by a foreigner after he had a different dispute with the tax office.
If that sale slips through what hope do you actually have for any others?
Once they are a resident they can purchase whatever property they wish just like an Australian Citizen.
You can buy citizenship or residency anywhere and get the perks, but that has nothing to do with the point I was making here. The point is that laws are useless until they are enforced.
But I don't think the distinction is meaningful, higher new build prices would drag up existing home prices.
Housing in Sydney is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people spend on it the more it’s value increases hence attracting more investors who drive prices up.
In order for this to stop the majority of the public will need to find this whole situation unacceptable.
I find it absurd that citizens from countries that disallow Australians to buy property can buy residential property here in Sydney. Apparently helping foreign citizens to avoid taxation/capital controls while propping up the construction/banking sector is more important than looking after the average citizens best interests.
One way for it to stop is for owner-occupiers to stop fetishizing a single family home on a 1/4 acre section and tolerate living in a high density apartment like most people in big cities everywhere else in the world.
I am not demonising these people. I am just merely saying that the Australian government, the banking industry and Australian society at large believe that it’s more important that a citizen/non-citizen can lease a residential property than it is for an average citizen and wage earner to be able to purchase a property to live in.
I find it funny that at the beginning of the pandemic when people were buying up all the available toilet paper to sell at a markup they were “selfish” but somehow doing the same with shelter is not.
Where is the direction of causality? I don’t know any first time home buyer that wants to be paying the maximum they can afford given bank lending standards. They are doing so because otherwise they cannot buy a house.
Unlike the vast majority of other human endeavors, land actually is a zero sum game, at least until we are a space-faring species.
* Within the Solar System the amount of land available on bodies with not-crushing-gravity is limited to a few times the Earth surface. This includes hospitable bodies like Venus, Titan or the Moon. The entire area of Mars is slightly smaller than Earth's land area, with climate conditions significantly worse than Antarctica. Sobering map: https://brilliantmaps.com/solar-system-surface
* Inter-stellar travel is subject to prohibitive time and energy costs. Physically speaking there is no way for Alpha Centaurians to visit their Earth properties on a regular basis, or vice-versa. This renders the whole concept of 'property owned by foreign stellar body inhabitants' moot.
Around 17% of the Netherlands is reclaimed from the sea or lakes. The largest project (the Flevopolder [1]) was 240,000 acres, reclaimed in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the land is still just meadows/grasslands (it has 2 towns with less than 350k inhabitants in total).
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam (less than 30min away by car or train) house prices keep increasing by 10%+ YoY. It seems that lack of physical land is not the main limiting factor.