“….foreign – mainly Chinese – buyers seeking to park their ill-gotten gains beyond the reach of the Communist Party have – in addition to global capitals like New York City and London – favored a handful of cities in the Pacific Northwest, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Many of these cities – for example, Vancouver – have seen property values rise to levels that are unaffordable for local buyers.”

“…with the flow of buyers refusing to slow despite efforts by the Chinese government to stop money moving offshore, many of these cities are getting desperate. And after years of occasional headlines, it appears the crisis has finally become dire enough for the mainstream press to start paying attention.”

“Jon Ellis, chief executive of Investorist, an online portal for cross-border property transactions, said Chinese property buyers are an “unstoppable juggernaut”. In some markets with large Mandarin-speaking populations, locals can spot real-estate ads in Mandarin at bus stations and benches in the surrounding area.”

“Officials complain that fending off foreign homebuyers is like squeezing a balloon: No matter where you press, the air moves elsewhere. After New Zealand passed a ban on foreign speculators buying homes (a measure the IMF blasted as “discriminatory”) last year, buyers moved back to Canada. And investors are already looking to Malaysia and Thailand as the next markets ripe for foreign buying.

Foreign capital is now returning to Canada, driving the latest surge in home prices. Buyers from China and the U.S. have found Victoria, the small capital of British Columbia that sits on an island west of Vancouver.”

“In Australia, Chinese buyers are believed to be responsible for between 10% and 15% of homes under construction. Chinese buyers prefer newer homes, and will demolish old homes to rebuild from scratch. The share is highest in Melbourne and Sydney, where foreign buyers account for a quarter of newly built apartments. At one swanky new development in Melbourne, Chinese buyers are said to be behind 10% of the sales.”

“Officially, Chinese citizens are only allowed to move $50,000 worth of yuan offshore every year.”

Just another Friday night for you?

But NAFTA and tariff said otherwise. Bhahahaha!

Sales are terrible. But listings are not much better.

West of Cambie I keep seeing the same old listings: it seems that people are holding off listing their property, in an attempt to time the market. Perhaps they believe the madness will start again in the Fall or next Spring. I somehow doubt it, but in the meanwhile, the only new listings are re-list of the same stuff at a slightly lower price.

If there are realtors or other insiders, I’d be happy to know their opinion about this.

And apparently it is June 1st.

“British Columbia, he says, has been particularly active in its trade tours to Hong Kong and China’s Mainland cities, “to prime the pump of economic relations.” The province has become dependent on the fees generated by the Business Immigrant Program (BIP) and real estate tax revenues. He cites the NDP opposition to the federal government’s effort to get tough with tax evasion in the 1990s, with tougher enforcement of the BIP. The development community also reacted.

“It seemed that more important than accurate reporting of global income was the imperative to keep the money flowing into BC,” he writes.”

And here is Andy Yan:

“He critiqued Dr. Yu’s and Dr. Lauster’s reports for disregarding the vast documentation and media reports on the globalization of residential real estate.

“Governments around the world have implemented policies including taxes to limit the role of foreign nationals in [the] local residential real estate market,” he writes. “These reports also fail to acknowledge the agency of Chinese Canadians and other visible minorities as political and social actors who have actively and publicly advocated for policies to deal with foreign ownership and capital in Vancouver.”

And here is Justin Fung:

“Mr. Fung is a Vancouver-born Chinese Canadian who works in the tech industry. He helped launch the non-profit group, Housing Action for Local Taxpayers (HALT), which takes the position that the affordability crisis is due largely to offshore wealth buying into the region’s housing market. It’s wealth that has been “facilitated by a powerful property development and real estate lobby that have too long influenced government policy and have profited significantly off this foreign investment and housing affordability crisis,” Mr. Fung writes in his affidavit, on behalf of the crown.”

Justing Fung is making sense:

“One of the reasons why I personally became involved in HALT and started speaking out was because I saw that others who were publicly citing the role of foreign buyers in price escalation – in particular, the role of wealthy Chinese foreign buyers – were attracting accusations of racism… I considered that I was in a position to contribute usefully to the public discourse, without the fear that others might have of being labelled racist,” he says.
He says that public concern about Chinese wealth flowing into Metro Vancouver is not about race. Instead, he argues, “the concern is fundamentally about class and wealth inequality…”

Developers, land holders, FIRE

Aided by hardworking homeowners. Lol

For SIDA:

“All levels of government have courted foreign money and actively encouraged it for decades, and we are seeing the consequences of that policy in Vancouver’s unaffordable housing market today.”

Is Ley a rabid racist as well?

David Ley:

“Dr. Ley doesn’t mince words in his expert opinion. He draws a direct line between the development industry and past governments that courted foreign investment. Government enthusiastically invited foreign capital, he says, and today, we see the consequences.

He explains that B.C. governments, facing a declining resource-based economy, have sought out East Asian investment since the 1980s. Starting with the sale of the Expo 86 site in 1988, the province made it abundantly clear that it was open to doing business with Asia, particularly in residential-property development, says Dr. Ley. “

And this. Could not put it more clearly myself:

“In regard to Dr. Lauster and Dr. Yu, who argue that the foreign-buyer transfer tax is part of a legacy of racism in Vancouver, Dr. Ley concurs with the historic part of their account. However, he says, “in Vancouver’s challenging housing market, Chinese Canadians are equally subject to acute affordability pressures and are among the leaders in urging solutions. Unlike the colonial period, there is no ethno-racial divide that neatly separates, homogenizes, and penalizes populations of East Asian origin.”

“They came to spend money. Why deny their visas?””

The assumption here is that, as long as they come to spend money, we should be admitting and welcoming anyone. No questions asked.

Do you all see why this is crazy, or I need to spell it out for you?

Interesting. It says one of the discussion topics of the conference was the “One belt, one road” initiative. There is some weird stuff going on around the world related to China’s efforts to secure resources for this project. Apparently governments are starting to take notice and there are related prosecutions in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that has something to do with these visas being denied.

Check out the Planet Money podcast episode #837: The Belt, The Road And The Money. Only 20 minutes long and super interesting. ttps://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money

3,000,000 ten year holders at last count. Projected to rise to 12 million in 5 years.

That’s 33% of the entire Canadian population.

Wow. Complete colonization.

It’s not automatically renewed, and I believe the maximum length of a single trip on such a visa is 2 years – not 6 months. Do you know anything at all about your favourite topic?

ICBC fire sale?

https://globalnews.ca/video/4261042/icbc-fire-sale

If he abolishes foreign buyers tax and tries to revamp RE prices, that is bearish for Van RE. Capital from China will find TO more inviting than us.

One can only hope….

I have no idea what it will do for real estate but it is going to be fun to watch Ford dismantle everything Wynne did over the past decade. What a mess.

Can’t know for sure, but, if you give back the people their hard earn money, you will have their vote. If you steal from people’s wealth, just have to look at the On Lib.

“An analysis by Kershaw found that in 1976 — around the time the baby-boom generation was coming of age — the price of an average Canadian home (figures adjusted for inflation) was $213,030 and the median full-time earnings for a 25-to-34-year old were $54,700. That’s a ratio of roughly four to one.

Compare that to 2017, when the average home price was $510,179 and income for the same age group was $49,800, pushing the ratio to 10 to one.”

“In Ontario, the ratio for 2017 rises to 12 to one, he adds. And in Vancouver, where home prices have taken the steepest climbs, the figure shoots to 14 to one. “Across the country today, the typical home price is up by hundreds of thousands of dollars while young people’s earnings on an annual basis have gone down by about $5,000,” Kershaw said. Paying for the house once you are in it, hasn’t got any easier either. Back in 1976, it took five months of full-time work to pay the annual mortgage on an average-priced Canadian home, after saving 20 per cent as a down payment, Kershaw said. In 2017, it took six months nationally (6.5 months in Ontario and eight months in B.C.). “Even if housing prices aren’t rising as fast this year as the last, the damage has… Read more »

But the millenials are digging their own grave. Need to vote for a populist national party.

They busy believing the msm. Their loss.

Not “could”. they are already doing it. This morning on CBC radio they had a tech worker who filed a freedom of information requests to disclose the agreement between Airbnb and the city of Vancouver. It turns out there is no obligation for Airbnb to remove listings that are in contravention to city bylaws. Instead, all enforcement will have to be shouldered by the city. The tech worker questioned the motives of the city for this: apparently enforcement is willingly slack and it would be cheap to make it harsher by requiring an automatic code verification snippet on the website. Yet, the city of Vancouver has no plans to request this cheap and powerful fix on the Airbnb posting page. In other words, the city wants to use soft power to dissuade, rather than actually pursue and fine. This is… Read more »

Yeah, you’re the one cursing, not me. Also, every time you rage-post without accepting the bet only makes this funnier.

My suggested wager has clearly hit a nerve. To be clear: none of your words change the fact that you do not believe enough in your position to make a simple, honor-based bet for ridiculously low stakes.

Keep ranting (and assigning wacky motives and thoughts to your perceived enemies/ “Eby lovers”).

“In his affidavit, David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants, says a key tactic of pro-growth real-estate advocates has been to claim that opponents of rapid expansion are xenophobic.

Developers first began playing the racism card in Vancouver and Los Angeles in the 1990s, Ley says. He notes Bob Rennie, a famed condo marketer and former chief of fundraising for the B.C. Liberal party, has alleged racism is “a huge undercurrent” in the housing debate.

Ley accepts Lauster and Yu’s analyses of B.C.’s discriminatory history up to the repeal of the immigration act in 1947. But he laments neither acknowledge how attitudes have changed. “Unlike in the colonial period, there is no ethno-racial divide that neatly separates, homogenizes and penalizes people of East Asian origin,” Ley says.”

““There is significant resistance within Vancouver’s Chinese‐Canadian community to inflationary pressures in the property market primed by foreign capital, dispelling innuendoes that such resistance is inherited from old racist attitudes held by white Canadians.”” “‘An Angus Reid poll found 89 per cent of the city’s ethnic Chinese support the foreign-buyers tax. Even the then-Chinese consul general in Vancouver, Liu Fei, said, “The Chinese government would have no hesitation in stepping in and regulating (house) price increases like this, unlike governments here.” Indeed, China has a range of restrictions on foreign buyers. And Yan’s affidavit makes it clear that jurisdictions throughout the world limit the purchasing power of foreign nationals. Yan says Yu and Lauster should not have ignored curbs on foreign buyers in Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Manitoba, Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain, Australia and the U.S. He could have added… Read more »

Douglas Todd is in great shape again. Here is one key question he asks:

“Li’s lawyer did not reply to questions about who has so far been paying for the lawsuit’s substantial costs.”

“Pain from the increase in monthly debt payments will be spread out over time because only about half of mortgage borrowers in any given year are affected by higher rates, the central bank said.

“Higher levels of debt mean that interest rate increases will have a larger effect on households’ financial positions and consumption spending than they had in the past,” the bank’s report said.

Household debt — mortgages and consumer debt such as credit cards — has swollen to C$2.1 trillion ($1.6 trillion), and as a share of income tops the Group of Seven. Two-thirds of that is mortgages.”

“The initial effect of tougher regulations and higher interest rates in recent months won’t be seen until perhaps September as data for the second quarter is reported”