You certainly won’t be seeing THIS reported on Global anytime soon.

Intriguing will be how Local Gov’ts address mill rate for Residential class. SFH assessments are no surprise. Condos looming to be a big disaster. Question is…do SFH get some relief on property taxes and condos pick up the slack?

Gov’t policy has funnelled buyers into the condo market. which simply adds more fuel to create a bigger collapse.

You want haircuts?….those that bought condos at the wrong time will suffer decapitation !

Was reading a few articles on CARmageddon…that car sales were juiced using the same methods as the 2008 crash….creating a huge credit bubble with liar loans etc. The dollar volume for auto sales is on par with housing crash with many of these loans also packaged and sold off to suckers. Watch his car bubble close.

Just the usual spin expected by his Postmedia /RE industry masters.

Will Victoria increase the 15 per cent tax on foreign ownership? The B.C. Liberals turned the surtax into the housing story of 2016, even while it had limited effect because of its many loopholes. The NDP in office hasn’t show much public interest in banning foreign purchases.

The NDP, however, has instituted modest measures to ease rent gouging and make it harder for foreign owners to pretend they’re residents of Canada so they can avoid paying capital gains on houses they don’t live in. The centre-left party has also ended foreign, corporate and union donations to political parties, which might reduce the power of B.C.’s property development industry.

Nor does the CMHC report capture the purchases of well-off immigrants, many of who move their families to Canada and buy their homes with overseas wealth (which is normally not taxed in Canada), a trend outlined in a groundbreaking December study by UBC geographer Daniel Hiebert.

Roughly 20 per cent of newly built condos in Metro Vancouver were sold to people who lived outside Canada — adding that foreign nationals concentrate on buying the country’s most expensive dwellings.

But the CMHC data revealed only the tip of the foreign-capital iceberg.

CMHC did not explore how easy it is for those making millions outside Canada to buy into Canadian real estate through proxies, such as spouses, children, trusts or companies.

“Many Chinese use foreign real-estate purchases as a means to safeguard a portion of their assets,” said a senior immigration manager in China, as reported in the December edition of the newsletter, Lexbase.

“It is clear many heads of family have purchased expensive homes in Canada and installed their families there while they continue to work in China.”

Increasing supply isn’t enough

The evidence overwhelmingly refutes those in the real-estate industry and former B.C. Liberal government who argue that foreign capital and migration have only had a trivial influence on Vancouver and Toronto’s housing market — and that all that is needed to solve the problem is to add more supply, to build more housing more quickly and more densely.

An internal Canadian immigration department report from Shanghai is the latest to expose the vast amounts of foreign capital creating housing demand in the city, a factor which Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson publicly acknowledged this fall was hitting Vancouver “like a ton of bricks,” after years of playing down the phenomenon.

Indeed, this year’s move by China’s authoritarian leaders to severely restrict how much money they will allow to leave their populous country appears to be a key reason prices on high-end detached houses in Metro have this fall been dropping by 15 to 20 per cent, even if most of the public hasn’t noticed.

Profits made in China and East Asia, then invested in Canadian real estate, have been responsible for a significant portion of exorbitant housing costs in Canada’s big cities. Yet Australia and New Zealand are doing much more than Canada to face the same challenge. They’re openly reining in the offshore demand that is contributing to housing havoc for locals, many of whom are being forced to leave their cities.

UBC geographer David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants, joins SFU’s Qiyan Wu in maintaining Chinese investment has become “a fundamental” of Metro Vancouver’s real estate market, up there with interest rates. National Bank of Canada economists estimate “almost $13 billion was spent by Chinese investors in Vancouver” in one year alone.

Douglas Todd is making sense. From the article:

“A clutch of real-estate industry and government officials in Canada still want the public to believe foreign capital and immigration policy have little to do with the sky-high housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto. But the evidence is pushing their vested voices to the fringe of the affordability debate.”

Here’x whats gonna happen in 2018 based on the numbers: China, USA and Oz are all gonna wipe out, especially in the 2nd half of 2018. OZ will laugh it off since they are used to it. New Zealand will be steadfast in what they started in 2017. Canada will do something different, so pay attention, because it will mark us for a loong time. For Russia it’ll be the best year in ages.

Douglas Todd must be wrong because it is all caused by locals. Amiright?

IMHO……Canada was set up long ago to be a money – laundering hotbed.

We have this huge country with the majority of the population concentrated into relatively tiny geographic hovels…aka top 10 Canuckistan cities hold over 50% of the total population. The classic Canuck was a combination of multi- generational or old school immigrants..ie sponsored in..no public assistance.

Once Canuckistan Gov’t used these(mostly Caucasian) suckers for the first 100 years to build Canuckistan into 1st world country…they let the non Caucasians in and take advantage of what we had built through blood sweat and tears..

………..aka whose the REAL SLAVE…???

sorry man, talk only, no action.

Get lost, creep.

Housing pretty phuque up, eh? What i would do is show the Client how I live, get them in a van.. sell the fixed house and reduce all debts. DRIVE the message HOME

Houses are for speculators and asset stripping refi mortgage Infidels…

Vehicles are for living in

Even clients in a position to scrape together a down payment for a home are expressing sadness and frustration over the “generational issue” of not being able to afford property they way their parents and grandparents could, Sutherland said.

“The wish to have one’s own home — that’s a dying dream for people in Vancouver,” Sutherland said.

For many families, the cost of rent — now more than $1,550 for the average two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation — eats up so much of their income that they must cut back on groceries and can’t enrol their children in after-school activities or replace their worn-out clothing.

“Even if someone says, ‘Yes, I’m securely paying rent every month,’ OK, well then, what else has had to be cut down because of it?” Crowley said. “There’s a whole cascade of problems that come from that one issue.”

“The tip of the iceberg”…meaning, there is more research to get underway, that’s all. So, quite trying to read more into this.

Another area where McCarrell hopes to shed light is overseas residents buying Canadian properties in the name of spouses or children.

If a foreigner buys a Canadian home with money generated overseas, and puts the property in the name of a child attending school in Canada, it would not count as foreign-owned in this initial StatsCan study. McCarrell said future CHSP research could compare tax filings and property title records to find, for example, certain neighbourhoods with disproportionate numbers of multi-million properties owned by “students” with no declared income.

For example, a property owned by a B.C.-incorporated shell company with foreign owners would, for the purposes of this month’s release, count as Canadian-owned, McCarrell said. Eventually, StatsCan wants to determine how much Canadian real estate is owned by “resident corporations with foreign owners.”

The new year will bring the release of more data providing a deeper, broader, and “much more nuanced” look into Canadian property ownership, said Haig McCarrell, director of the Statistics Canada division overseeing the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP)….experts stated the true proportion of foreign-owned properties could be higher. McCarrell said StatsCan hopes future research will illuminate more details about certain kinds of property ownership arrangements.