Tag Archives: bc

BC, economy, hype, opinion, predictions, prices

Foreign buyer tax hurts blue collar immigrants in the Fraser Valley?

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Business in Vancouver has an article predicting that the BC Foreign buyer tax will hurt blue collar immigrant workers in the Fraser Valley, which is weird because we were under the impression that the tax was on the Metro Vancouver area and the valley was exempt:

Rob Philipp, chief executive officer for the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB), said that while the new tax is aimed at high-end buyers, it’s only going to hurt the working-class immigrants who are trying to move to the region. He called the Fraser Valley’s immigrant population “the engine that drives us.”

“The people who are buying on the west side of Vancouver, they don’t really care about an extra 15% tax. If you’re buying two-, three- or four-million-dollar homes, they want into the market regardless.”

Philipp said the new tax also dampens the incentive for skilled out-of-country workers to settle in the region.

“As a province we’re trying to recruit really specialized professionals – doctors, nurses, certain types of engineers,” he said. “And those are people who are spending $800,000 to buy a place out here and now they’re thinking, ‘Well, I have to spend another $120,000. I’m not going to do it.’”

The other odd thing is that if skilled out-of-country workers actually ‘settle in the region’ and file a Canadian tax return they are exempt from the foreign buyer tax, so we’re curious how it would dampen incentives to move here any more than paying $800k for a house out in the Valley would.

Read the full article here and please correct us if we are mistaken about how the foreign buyer tax actually works.

BC, economy, equity, hype, opinion, politics, predictions, prices

Some thoughts on the Vancouver foreign buyer tax

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264 Comments

Yesterdays surprise announcement of a 15% tax on purchase of real estate by foreign buyers has some people cheering, some jeering and some people scratching their heads. Here are a few thoughts pulled from yesterdays thread:

Franko sees it as a positive for affordability:

The province taxing foreign buyers.
The city taxing vacant properties.
The CRA going after tax evaders.
It all would have been unthinkable a year ago, but the biggest hit by far will come from China clamping down on money fleeing the country. HAM is soo over….and it will lead the stampede to the exit.

Patriotz is a little more sceptical:

Christy wants to eat her cake and have it too, i.e. be seen to be “doing something” in Vancouver while keeping the floodgates open and directing the money to Abbotsford and points east – which is where her greatest electoral support is. And get extra revenue from foreign buyers who just have to buy in the taxable area.

MarKoz points out the obvious:

Foreign speculators could avoid paying the tax by getting friends or family who are permanent residents to buy on their behalf. Or the tax may lead to inflated housing prices in cities such as Victoria, Kelowna or Toronto.

LS in Arbutus says maybe not so easy to avoid the tax:

I wanted to point out that there are anti-avoidance measures in the legislation. An Anti-Avoidance Rule is typically a statutory rule that empowers a revenue authority to deny taxpayers the benefit of an arrangement that they have entered into for an impermissible tax-related purpose. Soooo I guess you can still gift your wife/kids money to buy a house, but you generally much more shenanigans than that would be caught in this type of rule. They are very wide sweeping these rules.

bullwhip29 points out how lucky some politicians are that the tax only applies to one area:

as luck would have it, mike de jong has all his eggs located just outside of greater vancouver and wont be affected by any of this (or least not in a negative way)

No matter what your thoughts are on this issue you’ve got to agree it’s pretty much the big news story in the Vancouver real estate market lately and it’s likely going to take a while to see what sort of effect it has on the local and related markets.

BC, debt, hype, opinion, prices

Lack of home inspection leads to no surprises

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At least it should come as no surprise that buying a home with no inspection leads to numerous nightmare scenarios when you actually inspect the property after purchase.

“Recently, I had one house that was so catastrophic, it needed some $350,000 in repairs. They were not expecting that at all because it was newly renovated. But that only concealed all the issues. It was lipstick on a pig. It needs a new foundation, piping, you name it, it needs to be done,” said Anderson, who has been an inspector for six years and was a builder for 25 before that.

A million bucks doesn’t get you what it used to in east van:

Last October, the 40-year-old and his spouse bid $955,000 on an older home in Hastings-Sunrise. It was listed at $899,000 and “we heard there were five bids. We were in the middle. We expected this and wanted to have a differentiating factor.”

Ahead of taking possession, “we had asked if we could get in to do some measuring for our furniture, but they wouldn’t allow it,” said Girard.

On moving day, they arrived to find “an absolute disaster,” said Girard, who described the home as being “not safe for our one-year-old daughter. That was the biggest problem.”

There were also holes in the wall, exposed electrical lines, flooring that didn’t meet walls, kitchen cabinets sitting unevenly over dirt floors covered in rodent droppings. The house, when they had seen it, had been “staged. They had positioned things to cover up problems. Drywall had been ripped out. There weren’t enough circuit breakers for things like the stove to be powered. We had to MacGyver things to make them work.”

Unsurprisingly, the Home Inspectors Association of BC recommends that you get a home inspection before buying.  Read the full article over at the Financial Post.

BC

BC Cabinet gains $2.3 Mill from real estate surge.

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CTV looked at how much rising real estate prices added to the personal wealth of the BC Cabinet – $2.3 million this year alone.

Surging real estate values added $2.3 million to B.C. cabinet ministers’ personal wealth this year alone, as the government says coming measures to ease housing affordability won’t include any that lower prices.

One minister saw her four properties jump $765,000, more than five times a minister’s salary. Another saw gains on a portfolio of eight homes. On average, ministers made $103,000 – more than an MLA’s salary, according to a review of public records by CTV News.

It’s natural for those ministers to welcome their own wealth boost, but they have to realize how their eye-popping gains translate into tremendous hardship for young people trying to get into the notorious Vancouver property market, said UBC professor Paul Kershaw.

Read the full article here.

As YVR points out, maybe it’s not just wealthy foreigners who are to blame for rising prices:

Funny thing is HAM is supposed to be buying all the property. Susan Anton owns 4 houses in Vancouver and DeJong owns 8 properties in Abbotsford.

Could that be the problem? Locals owning multiple properties? That is 12 properties between 2 people. Both are white and locals.

BC, Canada, economy, hype

Vancouver the 17th best city in BC

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When it comes to job market opportunity the city of North Vancouver does well at a respectable 3rd in the province. Here in Vancouver we come in as the 17th best city in BC.

For the second year, BC Business has ranked 36 communities in B.C. based on their job markets.

The publication looked at core economic indicators – average household income, income growth, population growth, unemployment rate, people with degrees – and added a new indicator of average household income for the under-35 demographic.

Peter Miron, senior research associate with Environics Analytics, who compiled the data for BC Business, says measuring income for the under-35 age group “is a good way of measuring the overall economic health of a community.”

Read the full list and original article here.