Slacker edition!
This is our regular end of the week news round up and open topic discussion thread for the weekend. It’s Friday Free-for-all time!
Normally we post links here, but we’re doing the bare minimum at the moment- may add those later. Meanwhile, what are you seeing out there?
Post your news links, thoughts and anecdotes in the comments below and have an excellent weekend!
About 100,000 Mexican men are expected to come to Vancouver over the course of the next 24 months if Trump starts deportations en masse.
This is going to get interesting. Chinese students with $$ vs MS-13 vying for the streets. i have my wagers on the latter.
Right now the rate of migrants is 5000/month.
Wait until June.
That’s some scary stuff. You might even scare a couple people to buy houses. Naw, you’ve got no credibility.
Who says they buying houses? Renting 4 per condo..
[…] new BC first time buyer program is proving to be popular with over 1000 applicants who will hopefully vote for the current government in the next […]
The Australian bubble continues. If there was any doubt on who runs the country.
Chinese criminals welcome and won’t have to face justice as long as they buy house in Australia.
It appears that the people who doubt it are:
The IMF
The Master Builders of Australia
The Real Estate Industry of Australia
The Property Council of Australia
“There is simply not enough foreign investment to skew the residential market as a whole”.
Any of that sound familiar?
Mar 27, 2017 Daily Review Vancouver Real Estate Housing Bubble News https://youtu.be/O8vIjWiqTYI
7000 party still on?
Dunno, but it’s time for a group hug to comfort one another. And getting back to bitching right after.
You seem to have no other skill in life besides taunting.
Bestplaceonearth leads a lonely miserable life, counting his rent income and wishing ill on others.
He is, by any metric, a sad loser. no amount of real estate assets can compensate for his sorry state of mind.
Even with the ordinary Monday bump, very, very low for the end of March.
Could possibly have come on the 1st, but I’d say that’s unlikely given that it’s a Monday. Either way we’ve been at 8K for how long now? A year?
Australian real estate shill politicians showing their true colours.
Ugly. Deport the criminals to face justice.
“B.C. first-time home program attracts more than 1,000 applicants”, Globe & Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-first-time-home-program-attracts-more-than-1000-applicants/article34431796/
“The B.C. Liberal government has received more than 1,000 applications from first-time home buyers who have been lured by new incentives under a program designed to improve housing affordability.”
“Critics, however, say the program is adding fuel to an already heated market for condos, notably in the Vancouver region.”
““Ottawa has been saying let’s have fewer highly leveraged buyers, but the province is saying we have to help the risky, leveraged first-time buyers get into the market,” Prof. Davidoff said in an interview Sunday. “The province has sweetened the pot.””
I guess it goes without saying that average joe’s who have been completely priced out of the housing market and are now feeling the noose tighten when it comes to rentals will also miss the boat when senior care is needed.
Care explain how the two are related? How does one catch the boat on senior care?
Asians and South Asians going to be fine as most live in intergenerational families.
It’s the Causcasians that will suffer as parents usually live separate from the kids. When one elderly has to go to a care home, what’s the other going to do?
Guess now is the time to speak up or otherwise shut up later.
How about the hybrid approach of shutting up now?
Since home ownership rates in Metro are highest they’ve ever been, most average Joe’s have been pricing themselves in. Few have missed getting onto the greater fool boat.
Happening right now:
As members of Congress in Washington debate raising the minimum required to obtain a U.S. immigrant investor visa from $500,000 to $1.35 million, concern about the hike has set off a scramble among wealthy would-be participants in China.
China’s wealthy, using not-always-legal means to skirt capital controls to get their money out and at the same time gain residency in the U.S., are continuing to dwarf all others as the largest participants in the EB-5 program, despite heightened measures by the Chinese government.
Like any other immigrant group, eh?
“using not-always-legal means”
Hilariously polite way of describing the behavior of chinese.
But yeah, they do tend to monopolize any type of immgrant investor program, don’t they?
While capital outflows have fallen sharply in recent months as regulators increase scrutiny and the yuan holds steady, analysts say there’s pent up pressure to move money out of China.
“Demand is strong to get money out,” said Pauline Loong, managing director at research firm Asia-Analytica Pte. in Hong Kong.
The problem, though, will likely remain how to bypass authorities seeking to rigidly enforce currency rules, said Dong, the Shanghai agent.
Why these people always looking for loopholes or ways to break laws. Do we really want them here? Why not have working class Chinese immigrants rather than the 90% law breakers we are immigrating.
Mar 26, 2017 Daily Review Vancouver Real Estate Housing Bubble News https://youtu.be/oMzCBhgnvsw
I love the tweet by Christine Duhaime. Some Chinese dude wanted to retain to change the title on some properties in Vancouver. The objective? Avoid reposession from Chinese creditors.
We are hearing more and more about such cases about Chibese “investors”. Good for our ecomy, right Christy?
Homeowner hopefuls find future in Powell River
http://globalnews.ca/news/3335274/homeowner-hopefuls-find-future-outside-vancouver-powell-river/
>>> if krusty approves the squamish to powell river hwy, then it’s seriously game over for average locals looking to buy their dream homes
A highway from Squamish to Powell River? Take a look at a map. And there is already a highway to Powell River. It is the two ferry rides that put a crimp in living there. Where these economic refugees will fail it that when the market unwinds they will be stuck with a house in the boondocks that they cannot sell. Then they are doubly screwed.
>>> I’ve heard that feasibility study is complete and govt is sitting on results. this remains to be seen if this is yet another attempt to get hyped up voters onside pre-election or a big announcement is coming when it makes more sense to do so. obviously another Massey bridge sized project (or larger) wouldn’t fly right now.
That how people end up living their wholes lives in the boondocks. It’s OK if you like the boondocks, I guess.
Are any of you old enough to remember Japanese adventures into
American markets decades ago?Same shit here exactly,only with the entire
western world , apparently up for grabs,the Chinese are going to experience the
same fate! But, the way it has played out this time,all who participated with appreciating
prices,only to buy again & again,those are the ones who will be burned as well as foreign
investors!!
Dream on. Unless policies are put in place to limit the RE scarcity, the problem will not be solved. When the Japanese were buying abroad we lived in a much less globalixed world, Passports and borders had still a meaning back then. And individual families could not move capital as easily.
Both the scale of China and the general circumstances are different than in the 1980s.
Come on, in those times Japanese were free to send money out of the country just like Canadians. And visit Canada without a visa. Neither of which the Chinese can do today.
The real point is that Japanese families had no motive to send money out of the country. There was massive Japanese investment abroad in RE all right, but it was by corporations in major developments.
My point is that average families today have a much wider set of financial vehicles to send money out, including pooling together small amounts of money with other families to make larger investment pools (a common practice among mainlanders).
Of course, the Jaoanese lacked the motive, as you correctly pointed out. Japan is an advanced democracy, China is a brutal dictatorship.
Comoaring what is happening today with past episodes like the Japanese wave in the 1980s is purposefully misleading. Both in scale and circumstances these are very different phenomena.
People have had the ability to pool smalller sums of money since the invention of money.
I think prices were generally low here back then, but the response from the public here was the same. Before that, it was the Arabs who were going to buy everything. Fearing the outsider is as old as the earliest tribes. It’s hard to be rational when you are wired for something.
There is nothing irrational about it. The “Arabs” did buy everything. Then it was the Japanese. Now it is the Chinese. This is the effect of globalization and it is real and it is here now.
But you see, they did not buy everything. Not even close to everything. Not even 1% of anything. And yet, all this time later, with the facts available in black and white, you still think they bought a lot. That should tell you something about how easy it is to get carried away by a story and miss the facts. It’s happening again now.
We actually only have stats on how much foreign buyers are buying, not on how much they are holding. For all we know they hold 15% of all SFH in Vancouver.
As Doomcouver said in a previous post, even if 5% of purchases are by foreign buyers, if every year only half of those sell, in 10 years that would mean 25% of real estate was held by foreign buyers (some may have become locals in that timeframe too).
Also, I don’t think the fear that “they’re buying everything” really needs to be taken literally. If foreign buyers hold 10-20% of all properties and don’t intend to rent them out, that will have a big impact.
I think you are off on a not-very-productive path. Properties that are not on the market are not part of the market. In round figures, 99% of properties are off the market at any time. Not selling is the single most popular thing to do with a property. It doesn’t really matter who is not selling them.
While this is true, and as patriotz pointed out my math is wrong (by an order magnitude or more), we should not simply ignore the fact that land banking is a thing, and IMO adds an unneeded reason for property to be artificially kept apart from the market. Under normal uses by owners and owner-occupiers properties will come on and off the market naturally.
I guess some (or alot) of foreign held, land banked properties will come onto the market if the market corrects, but in the rising market it must be adding some pricing pressure.
Land hoarding is real, sizable and widespread. And if we ran a census of land owned by foreigners (non PR or non citizens) in Van, it would be rather higher than 5% of the total. You can start from UBC and count your way eastwad.
If it’s real then prove it rather than just pulling numbers like that out of your butthole.
I don’t see why it matters if foreign investors or local families buy and hold. It’s still bought and held. Just because Oracle or someone got the idea the Chinese people (due to their propensity for all things awful) would hold longer than locals does not mean that it is true. There are 75 K empty homes out there, and it really doesn’t matter who owns them.
“in 10 years that would mean 25% of real estate was held by foreign buyers ”
There is plenty wrong with this, but I’ll start by pointing out that only a small fraction of properties is sold in a given year.
Yes you are correct, I guess the numbers would be much more miniscule than that.
maybe if you had some “irrational fear” you wouldn’t be priced out.
You are right. And if you’d maxed out a LOC to go all in Apple in the early 2000s you’d be sitting pretty too. The rearview mirror is our oyster.
the japanese didn’t move here.
People in Canada or at least in BC should be doing the same.
“Nationwide anti-corruption protests bring thousands into Russia’s streets”
Lol, “less catastrophic” is still catastrophic.
The coming housing downturn will be less severe due to Chinese buyers
It’s laughable that Credit Suisse assumes Chinese demand will still be strong when no locals are buying and the market is crashing. Mark my words, when locals no longer think real estate is a good investment, and this WILL happen, the wealthy Chinese will no longer think it’s a good investment either.
You mean when the market rolls over it’ll turn out there was never the infinite supply of greater fools that the greedy locals are relying on? Shocking.
Era of easy money ending in China
From a Toronto perspective a city which recently began the Vancouver mania nightmare. A thoughtful read.
Nothing new here, buy the screw-over by Chinese money laundering and a corrupt BC government continues to impact real Canadians:
http://www.250news.com/canadian-press/?loc=1&id=1aebd014-396d-4075-837a-c724a79a8d8e
buy = but
Vancouver hot-shots tie for title at national yo-yo championships
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canadian-yo-yo-championships-winners-1.4041549
You do know that kid is a local who attends a local school and speaks perfect English?
The kast paragraph could have been written by any of us here years ago.
“As obvious as it is now, we were coerced into turning a blind eye. A make believe world where foreign buyers make up no more than 5% of Metro Vancouver transactions and property transfer tax revenues soaring by nearly half a billion dollars is the new norm. Dependant on the Chinese real estate binge to support prices and keep the economy afloat while also trying to make homes affordable for locals. One hell of a juggling act.”
I think claiming that 5% sales is a low number is a bit of a distraction. What’s important to know is how many foreigners sell their properties after buying them. I would bet the majority of foreign buyers are buy and hold investors right now and own multiple properties. If they buy 5% each year but aren’t selling 5% each year they’re slowly crowding out the market. What we really need to know is what % of the city is foreign owned, or owned via proxy with foreign money. That’s the number politicians should care about. Politicians like Christy Clark don’t care though and that’s the problem. Even if only half of the 5% foreign buyers are hoarding real estate, that means after 10 years of that activity, and no new detached homes being built, There’s only 78% of the… Read more »
Very good point, and something I have also thought about.
The share of liveable units in the hands of foreigners is the right metric.
The only disagreement I have with you is about Christy Clark. I believe she cares very much about this issue: she wants foreigners to buy even more!
So since you have the data for foreign sales you’re going to shift the goalposts and demand stats for ownership?
What will you ask afterwards for when that metric refutes your argument?
I won’t matter. Once someone has taken a walk somewhere they don’t usually go and heard people speaking what they guess to be Chinese, there really are no stats that can overcome that kind of evidence.
I’ll repeat my prediction that the census will show a record owner-occupancy rate in metro Vancouver. I don’t think foreign buyers are preventing locals from buying at all.
That is the wrong comparison. How many people are not able to live in Vancouver at all?
If you limit the population by forcing locals out, your occupancy rates are meaningless. At the limit they may approach one, if fireigners crowd out locals.
I like doomcouver’s theory and think its something important to consider.
But if patriotz is right that owner-occupancy rates are at an all time high then foreigners aren’t crowding out locals, since by definition they’d be “locals” (anyone living here is a local).
This is why I like David Ebby’s distinction between foreign buyers and foreign money used by locals.
Personally I don’t see how owner-occupancy rates can be at an all time high when there are so many empty units. I’ve never seen so many empty houses and condos in all of 17 years that I’ve been watching this market.
” I don’t see how owner-occupancy rates can be at an all time high when there are so many empty units.”
Because empty units don’t enter into the calculation. The owner-occupancy rate is the % of households who own the dwelling they live in. If a unit is empty there’s no household to count. Note that applies to AirBnB “empty” units as well as the foreign owned ones.
Toyko prices have risen 0%.
From what I understand, locusts are not permitted to launder money in Japan.
Anyone can buy real estate in Japan and there is a fair amount of Chinese investment buying. The big difference is that the Japanese are not as stupid as they once were, so they aren’t trying to outbid each other and the fearsome Chinese.
The politics of Chineseinvestment in Japan are way more complex than you make it sound. You may have lived there, but your simplification suggests you don’t understand their histories.
Chinese would never be able to buy in Tokyo as much as they did in Vancouver. The Japanese politicians would face a stern challenge from their voters.
There’s an alternate theory: since prices are not rising like bananas in Japan foreign money is less attracted to it. Why would they “invest” in properties that sit there stagnating in price?
Its a feedback cycle for all markets (going up attracts more foreign investment and causing more local FOMO, going down or staying flat attracts less foreign investment and less local FOMO).
You are missing the point: for many mainlanders homes are simply gold bricks. A firm of storage of value. Even if prices are not growing, they are happy to keep the money out if the reach of the Chinese government.
Buying up Japan is just nit an option for the Chinese. Too much history.
That’s right. There is a foreign investor component in any bubble. People from around the world are attracted to them. Lots of Canadians bought Miami condos back in the day. And, of course, the presence of foreign buyers is the ultimate seal of bubble approval. That’s when we know that it’s the best investment In The World. But when prices are low, nobody wants in — not locals and not foreigners.
Chinese do not buy Vancouver just because of price expectations. It is too a large extent a Chinese city now, and they consider it as a hedge if things go sour back home. Vancouver us a place where to move money and family, in case things turn bad in China.
You make it sound like Chinese mainlanders are just comparable to any other group of investors. It is blatantly clear this is not a tenable assumption any more, at least in Vancouver.
I agree, we hit a tipping point and now a Chinese person with means can move here and live an almost totally Chinese life. If i were a Chinese person, I too would be attracted to Vancouver/Richmond.
I’ve never been a “languages” person and for me learning a new language in my 40s would be onerous. The idea of moving to Vancouver and being able to get every service i need in my native language would be very appealing. Throw in hundreds of thousands of my countrymen and that would seal the deal. Vancouver is just a home away from home.
Maybe visit China first, then decide how similar Richmond is.
I guess it worked for the Brits….
“In case things turn bad in China”. Arguably, people who think like this are not thinking of Canada, Australia, UK, and the US as a contingency, they have a direct intent to eventually try to immigrate here and eventually those become locals. I would view those as future locals, and prefer that we tax them before, during, and after their arrival to protect non-wealthy locals.
I think this is a smaller segment of foreign buyer. The real ones to fear should be those middle class foreign buyers with no intent to live here, no understanding of our market or our living standards, and simply want to get in on the “can’t lose” investment of VanRE.
Funny, you’ll find articles from 2010 in the Financial Times about Chinese money pouring into Japanese real estate. But prices have gone up 0% you say? How so?
Not a frequent poster but I’m here to provide anecdotal evidence of what I see. Contrary to some other posters saying that Burnaby is dead, I see a lot of activities lately in SFH market around where I live. The listings are sold in 2-3 weeks in the recent past. One interesting observation I had today at an Open House by Nu Stream realty. The house was never having a listing sign and all of a sudden an Open House scheduled for today. I was driving by and found people hurrying to pay a visit. I saw only people with asian ethnicity there. It reminds of the hectic activities of last year when I saw similar crowds in a red hot market. So my conclusion is that this market has some legs left before the money dries up, if ever.… Read more »
Until the last locust is still standing Vancouver’s RE market will be the lost case. Fucking plague must be eliminated in order for the city’s life to get back to some sense.
…………. and perhaps this takes care of a lot of the problems. That sound you just heard was several thousand real estate agent’s jaws hitting the ground. Lol.
If the Chinese were making a comeback of any kind this should dissuade them. Lol
Another example of locusts engaging in widespread fraud, as if we haven’t seen enough examples from them:
“Some property owners, for instance, are claiming to real estate officials that they are Canadian residents, so they can avoid capital gains taxes while selling houses and qualify for permanent resident status.
But some of the same people, at the same time, are claiming to the CRA that they are not residents under our tax law, so they don’t have to declare their global income and property holdings, and pay income taxes on them in Canada.”
I do not oppose any measure in which involved parties end up with more skin in the game and more to lose. Keeps everybody honest and keeps everybody vigilant. Helps create an atmosphere and environment in which tax criminals understand that they are not wanted or welcome. Because no realtor, lawyer, notary will work with them and no citizen will buy from them. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THAT NOW, you ask rhetorically. After all, we all suffer directly from tax crime. Tax revenue stolen by tax criminals means that schools, hospitals, womens’ shelters, affordable housing, safe injection sites, roads, ferries, ambulances, police, and environmental watchdogs fighting for a smaller pool of provincial and federal funding. If someone steals a bicycle from one Canadian and you buy it from them, you are a criminal because you have willingly participated in the… Read more »
I would suggest that you can find answers to questions like these in a book with a title like Canadian Law for Dummies or An Introduction to Common Law, or even an online high school civics class.
Of course, I’m breaking your balls here, but it is also actually true that being acquainted with the basics of law will make all sorts of policy issues easier to understand.
Tax evasion is not criminal?
Are you a realtor?
Go read a bit first, then we can talk.
http://barretttaxlaw.com/tax-fraud-tax-scams-tax-evasion-faq/#faq-item-193 What is tax evasion? Simply put, tax evasion is the act by any person, business or entity to illegally evade paying taxes. Tactics used in tax evasion include the misrepresentation of income and profit by reporting less than actually earned and taking additional deductions that are not allowed by law. An example of tax evasion would be an individual who earns income in cash and does not report it to the Canada Revenue Agency in order to pay less tax. Businesses also can be found guilty of tax evasion if they purposefully report fewer sales than actually made to avoid taxes on any additional sales transactions. What are the penalties for tax evasion? According to Section 238 of the Income Tax Act, if an annual tax return is not completed and filed, then an individual is guilty of a… Read more »
I’m sure you have a point in your own mind, but I can’t guess what it is. You asked why receiving stolen goods is a criminal office but providing legal or financial counsel is not. (It sometimes is, btw.) Now you are quoting random laws.
I think the takeaway is that you are outraged. Noted.
Offences and Punishment
Marginal note:Offences and punishment
238 (1) Every person who has failed to file or make a return as and when required by or under this Act or a regulation or who has failed to comply with subsection 116(3), 127(3.1) or (3.2), 147.1(7) or 153(1), any of sections 230 to 232, 244.7 and 267 or a regulation made under subsection 147.1(18) or with an order made under subsection (2) is guilty of an offence and, in addition to any penalty otherwise provided, is liable on summary conviction to
(a) a fine of not less than $1,000 and not more than $25,000; or
(b) both the fine described in paragraph 238(1)(a) and imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months.
So there’s that.
We have to ask ourselves if we really need the made in asia manufactured goods. Stuff made in asia for export is really another loophole, since the quality is very poor (manufactured obsolescence) They arent making it for their home market, so why give a shit? Make it for Canada! The money made from exports to Canada, is then used to infiltrate the country through enterprise loophole RE. Chinas patron saint country is Israel. Dont lambast me for saying this, they’ve said it themselves.
