Study says foreign buyers spend more on B.C. homes, but some dispute data

2016/07/12 Leave a comment

More on Vancouver housing and immigration:

Critics argue there are larger holes in the data than the small window of time it encompasses.

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver immigration lawyer who works with wealthy clients from China, said the government should break the statistics out into postal codes so foreign ownership of high-end homes could be better tracked, and ultimately taxed. Four per cent of Vancouver sales were registered to foreigners, but Mr. Kurland said those likely occurred in a select number of tony west side neighbourhoods.

“It would be useful, because this is a problem that should not be attacked by a mallet, but a surgeon’s scalpel,” he said. “The driver is at the high end of the property market.”

Richmond and Burnaby saw the highest levels of foreign ownership in the region, at 11 per cent and 14 per cent respectively, but there is no indication of where that investment occurred, he said.

Mr. Kurland said the government’s metric is not gauging the true level of foreign participation in the local housing market because it is classifying tens of thousands of wealthy “investor immigrants” from China as permanent residents despite earning all of their income abroad and, in some cases, continuing to live abroad while owning properties in B.C.

From 2002 to 2013, about 1,000 millionaire migrants flocked to Vancouver each year under a federal government program that was ultimately shut down after Mr. Kurland raised concerns over its effectiveness at generating local economic growth.

This net migration has made a large impact because when these families bought a home in B.C. another unit of housing was not relinquished into the market.

“With domestic people it’s [often] a push: one bought, one sold,” he said. “With an immigrant investor, it’s one bought, none sold, and that’s what restricts supply.”

Tom Davidoff, a professor at the University of British Columbia and economist leading the charge for a targeted property tax, said the government should not “drag nationality” into the housing debate, but rather focus on whether people owning homes in this frothy market also earn their money in the region.

If not, then those owners should be charged a surtax for enjoying government services paid for through income tax, he said.

“When you’re using something scarce you should pay the true cost,” he said.

Source: Study says foreign buyers spend more on B.C. homes, but some dispute data – The Globe and Mail

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Panel addresses realtor language barrier in British Columbia – The Globe and Mail

2016/07/09 Leave a comment

Yet another aspect of Vancouver’s real estate industry problems:

Many of B.C.’s realtors lack the English skills necessary to protect buyers and sellers in a market where English is the operating language for licensing education and official contracts, says a report from an independent panel being used by the provincial government as a road map for regulation reform.

Among the panel’s 28 recommendations is a suggested comprehensive review of the licensing and education requirements for aspiring realtors, including a consideration of the role of fluency in a market where many licensees deal mainly with fellow non-native English speakers.

The provincial government released data on Thursday showing that during a three-week period last month, about one in 20 homes in the Vancouver area was purchased by a foreign buyer, the majority from China. But even if many transactions are conducted in a language other than English, the formal documents required to complete the deal are entirely in English.

“This creates a risk that licensee’s education and ongoing proficiency will be impacted by language proficiency or comprehension issues,” the report stated. “This is a risk that the regulator cannot ignore.”

Many long-time agents have argued the current system makes it far too easy for anyone to join the industry and that language proficiency requirements are too easy to skirt.

Aspiring real estate agents in British Columbia must spend at least 10 weeks completing a series of online assignments through the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. Applicants must then complete a 100-question multiple-choice test, earning a mark of 65 per cent or higher, to become licensed.

If they weren’t educated in English, the real estate students must also write a separate exam where they prove their fluency by attaining a mark of at least 60 per cent on a several-hundred-word essay.

Language proficiency within the real estate industry has become part of the charged debate around foreign ownership. But formal complaints about it are rare: A search of recent disciplinary decisions by the Real Estate Council of B.C. failed to turn up a case of realtor wrongdoing where a language barrier was a direct factor.

Tony Gioventu, a member of the advisory panel and head of a trade association for B.C.’s condominium owners, said submissions from the public and industry insiders to the advisory panel made it clear that language proficiency has been an issue.

“The parties didn’t necessarily always understand what they were signing or what the implications of what they were signing was,” he said.

Several real estate brokerages offer prep courses to help aspiring realtors cram for the multiple-choice licensing exam, as well as the essay component that non-native speakers must write.

New Coast Realty, one of Metro Vancouver’s most controversial and fastest-growing brokerages, has five branches across the region that prep students seeking to become licensed.

“This complicated professional course intimidates even native English speakers. The difficult-to-understand legal and real estate terms discourage many otherwise interested people,” states a Chinese advertisement for the company’s prep course. “Our knowledgeable instructors and concise materials will help you learn easily and pass the exam quickly, paving the way for your career or investment plans.”

UBC in the past has defended its licensing program as rigorous, but says it looks forward to working with the government to “help to promote public protection and satisfy the professional education requirements” of realtors across the province.

Realtor Gary Wong suggested that adding a written essay or oral exam component to the multiple-choice licensing test would automatically raise the language-proficiency bar and make it harder for everyone to become a realtor, something the province has promised to do as it overhauls the existing real estate regulations.

He said roughly half the Chinese-Canadian agents he deals with see his name and start their conversation in Mandarin. Mr. Wong, who speaks Cantonese and only a smattering of Mandarin, said business continues as usual once he asks them to switch back to English.

“It’s not the greatest, but you can work around it,” he said, noting that agents can use templates for most contract clauses, which eliminates grammar mistakes or spelling errors.

Source: Panel addresses realtor language barrier in British Columbia – The Globe and Mail

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Housing prices: Singling out ethnicity of buyers is unhelpful | Yuen Pau Woo

2016/07/06 Leave a comment

While his first and third points are largely valid, the nature of Vancouver ethnic demographics and that those from China are the main source of foreign investment is a reality.

Similar to having a conversation about extremism and terrorism without making any reference at all to the link with religion and Islam in particular.

Finding a vocabulary to have an open discussion, and finding a way to respectfully but honestly debate the issues, is always a challenge.

But silence on the ethnic origin ignores the main driver:

First, most accounts of the role of Chinese buyers do not distinguish between non-residents and residents, or indeed between Canadian citizens, landed immigrants and foreign nationals. The vast majority of homes owned by Chinese people in the Lower Mainland belong to folks who have residency status in Canada — in other words, they are Canadians, not foreigners. There are hundreds of thousands of people with last names spelled in the fashion of mainland Chinese who are Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. [note I would not call those with Permanent Residents status Canadians, that term should be reserved for citizens]

Second, even if one is able to identify Chinese buyers who are truly “foreigners”, there has been little consideration given to their economic contribution to the local economy. Housing affordability, after all, is a function of both prices and income. Are these buyers connected to the international student population in B.C. that contributes about $1.5 billion a year to the local economy? How many local businesses have benefited from the investments of these high net worth individuals? The much-cited study identifying Chinese buyers of local condos looks at the numerator in the affordability equation, but totally ignored the denominator. Where is the equivalent study of their impact on jobs and incomes?

Third, and most importantly, singling out Chinese buyers is irrelevant when it comes to a public policy response. There may be a case for surcharges on foreign purchases of residential real estate and on property speculators, but any such policy would surely apply without regard to country of origin or ethnicity. After all, while China may be this year’s source of hot capital outflows, some other region could assume that role next year. Indeed, that may already be happening with the tightening of capital controls in China, the appreciation in the U.S. dollar, and heightened political uncertainty in much of the rest of the world.

So why this parlour game of pointing the finger at Chinese buyers? I don’t doubt that many researchers and writers on the subject have good intentions, but they are naive to think that singling out an ethnic group is nothing more than dispassionate analysis and a crusade against political correctness. On the contrary, they are unwittingly giving voice to darker sentiments in the populace and normalizing the language of chauvinism.

You see, I find out about their well-meaning articles and quotes when I get nasty spam messages from groups that actually don’t like Chinese people, or immigrants in general, and who gleefully hold up these articles as vindication of their beliefs. In the same way that the Brexit vote has given voice to racists in the U.K., the incessant focus on Chinese buyers as villains in Vancouver’s affordability crisis is propagating prejudice and promoting distrust.

None of the above is a dodge from discussing and dealing with the challenges of housing affordability in Vancouver. But there are no solutions to be found in singling out the ethnicity of buyers, and no winners in the divisive game of race baiting.

Source: Opinion: Singling out ethnicity of buyers is unhelpful | Vancouver Sun

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The Asian force behind Vancouver’s housing boom

2016/05/28 1 Comment

More on immigration and the over-heated Vancouver housing market and the related analysis by David Ley:

If he wanted to, geographer David Ley could consider himself a data point in his own research. It was back in 1996 that he was named UBC director of the Metropolis Project, an international inquiry into immigration and diversity. By that time, he’d seen his own Kerrisdale neighbourhood being remade by rich immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan who’d sent house prices soaring.

Ley’s 2010 book, Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, displayed empathy for the immigrants while also identifying problems that their mass arrival wrought. By the time it was published, a new wave, this time from mainland China, had begun turbocharging Vancouver property markets yet again. For concerned officials and researchers, Ley’s book was one of the few resources available, even though it described an earlier time and a different group.

Today, a continuing lack of research and official data about the role of Chinese immigrants and investors in Vancouver’s housing insanity* remains, for some in government and the real estate industry, a rationale for doing nothing. “The interesting question is why there are deniers,” Ley says. “Often you find a vested interest.”

Ley’s latest research describes an influx of foreign capital turning Vancouver’s housing market into a Wild West land rush. He pins much of the blame on governments for whom rich Asian immigrants have become an easy fiscal fix.

In the early 1980s, Canada and especially British Columbia were in deep recession. One cure, governments in Ottawa and Victoria hoped, would be programs encouraging high-net-worth individuals from Asia and elsewhere to immigrate.**

While the immigrants did come, the economic benefits did not. It hardly mattered that Canada’s visas had less demanding standards than most other countries’, Ley says, because we didn’t uphold them anyway. Originally, aspiring business-class immigrants could choose from two main streams. In the investor stream, Canada required a lower net worth and minimum investment than did the United States – and, in the end, while banks and governments definitely got a take, there was never much in the way of actual investment.

Meanwhile, “with the entrepreneur stream, after two years you had to have hired one Canadian,” says Ley. “In the equivalent American scheme, you had to hire 10 Americans.” But in B.C. – where more than half of all business immigrants eventually landed*** – evaluations were minimal or were waived. “And this was because there was half a dozen people in the Vancouver office tasked with following up on the thousands of cases, which simply wasn’t possible.”

The Canada Revenue Agency has been similarly ineffective. The declared income of business immigrants is lower than any other category of immigrants, including refugees, Ley points out. Nor did we bother tracking property markets. The B.C. government did keep records of home buyers’ nationalities but stopped during the 1990s. “The reason I’ve heard is that there was a storage issue,” he says. “I’m passing that along while raising my eyebrows.”

Then there is the federal agency Fintrac, which is supposed to stop money laundering. Anecdotal information suggests that a large portion of Chinese buyers pay in cash (in the U.S., there is data).****  “The property market is one of the easiest ways to dispose of hot money,” Ley notes.

Ottawa abruptly eliminated both the investor and entrepreneur streams in 2014, but many of the 50,000 Chinese lined up at the time opted instead to use a new 10-year come-and-go visitor visa that does not lead to citizenship. Of the more than 300,000 Chinese come-and-gos that year, most were tourists, but a significant number employed it as an inexpensive, low-hassle mobility tool, in many cases to buy a second home occupied by student children.

In 2014 China had more than one million people with liquid assets of over $2-million. Up to 60 per cent were weighing or pursuing emigration, with Vancouver among the three top intended destinations. It’s hardly surprising that several surveys and estimates (none of them officially sanctioned, of course) place the proportion of Chinese buyers of detached homes on Vancouver’s west side at about 70 per cent and growing. “The top end of the market is not being supported by local conditions,” says Ley. “We’ve got a housing market that is totally out of whack with the labour market.” That is, people who actually hold jobs in Vancouver increasingly cannot afford to live there.

Some of the additional machinations that are throwing that market out of whack have only recently come to light. New Coast Realty stands accused of both shadow flipping and predatory pricing, following a Globe and Mail investigation.

Of course, there are beneficiaries besides the real-estate industry: namely, Vancouver homeowners. But not Ley. “My wife and I are steadfast stayers. But the craziness of the last six months has shifted a lot of people.”

Source: The Asian force behind Vancouver’s housing boom – The Globe and Mail

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Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students

2016/05/24 Leave a comment

Not surprising that universities and other educational institutions view foreign students from an economic perspective and that foreign families consider not only the education but financial (shift money to Canada, invest in real estate) and political benefits (citizenship).

But, as in the case over the debate over housing prices, it raises policy issues:

Immigration Canada data shows about 72,000 foreign students from Mainland Chinese were accepted in 2014, 36,000 from India, 17,000 from South Korea and 13,000 from France. In total, one out of four foreign students in Canada is from China.
Canadian politicians talk in predictable ways about the increasing number of foreign students.

Wilkinson maintains Chinese and other foreign students bring “social, cultural and economic benefits.” And they pay full fees for their own educations, unlike subsidized homegrown students.

The federal Immigration Minister John McCallum often calls foreign students “the cream of the crop.”

But noted specialists in higher education, including Boston College’s Philip Altbach and Ontario’s Jane Knight, say the quality of foreign students is going down as their numbers inflate.

Most foreign students are now second tier, say Altbach and Knight. They’re generally not doing well in the schools in their countries of origin. But many have rich parents.

Given the trend, Knight argues that most Western foreign-student programs have lost their humanitarian origins and become elaborate cash grabs. They make it possible for governments like British Columbia’s to mask that they are tightening education funding.

What are some foreign students in Canada doing when they’re not studying?

Canada’s federal housing agency, looking for new methods to track foreign ownership in the country’s soaring real estate markets, has considering classifying foreign university students as foreign buyers as it steps up its investigation into global money-laundering.

Bloomberg News discovered that Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp., the Crown corporation that tracks housing data, is especially interested in how the red-hot housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are partly fuelled by foreign students, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar homes near the UBC campus.

In a related study, urban planner Andy Yan, head of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, discovered that in a six-month period in 2015, about 70 per cent of 172 detached homes sold on Vancouver’s west side were purchased by Mainland Chinese buyers.

Yan’s research showed that, of all self-declared occupations among owners of the high-priced homes in the study, 36 per cent were housewives or students with little income.

Five of eight homes owned by “students” were bought outright with cash at an average value of $3.2 million.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, a frequent adviser to the federal parliament, said it’s clear that most children from around the world who are able to afford to live and pay full education fees in expensive cities like Toronto and Vancouver are from “elite families.”

One bonus of getting children into Canada as foreign students, Kurland says, is that those who are able can become players in real-estate investment. Students are being declared as property owners of Vancouver residential property because they aid in international money transfers, Kurland said.

Foreign students have the advantage of being able to appear as residents of Canada for income tax purposes, even as their declared earned income would be extremely low.

As principal resident of a dwelling, Kurland said, a foreign student does not have to pay capital gains when his or her home is sold at a profit. “Then, out of the goodness of their heart, they can send the profit back to their uncle in China,” Kurland said with irony.

In addition to aiding the movement of trans-national wealth, however, possibly the more common reason a well-off foreign family puts a great deal of effort into establishing their son or daughter in Canada is that it goes a long way to obtaining a second passport.
Canadian politicians often rank international students as prime candidates for immigration. Roughly three out of 10 foreign students have gone on to become Canadian citizens. And that proportion is expected to rise.

Kurland believes more foreign students from China are being flown to Canada at “younger and younger ages … in part because they’re a no-fit in the Chinese educational system.” They need to establish themselves early in Canada’s educational system if they’re going to make it.

The immigration lawyer, who publishes a newsletter called Lexbase, discovered that Mainland Chinese families have doubled the rate at which they’re sending their children to Canadian elementary and high schools. Four out of 10 foreign students in Canada, including those from Mainland China, now apply for “secondary school or less.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students | Vancouver Sun

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Chinese real estate investors are reshaping the market

2016/05/11 Leave a comment

Good long-read in Maclean’s on the impact of Chinese investors and immigrants in the Vancouver, Toronto and other real estate markets. Most interesting point for me was that Chinese Canadians, equally affected by rising housing prices, are participating more in the debates:

Last November, the 38-year-old lawyer and former head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association helped Andy Yan, acting director of SFU’s City Program, with his headline-grabbing study on home buying in Eby’s West Side riding. In addition to the incendiary data involving Chinese names, the study revealed that 36 per cent of owners on homes worth an average of $3.05 million listed their occupations as housewives or students with little or no income. Fully 18 per cent of the 172 homes purchased were not mortgaged by banks. That means on Vancouver’s West Side alone over a six-month period last year, roughly $100 million in cash came pouring into Canada, almost all of it from China. Yet the homeowners would in all likelihood pay little or no income tax. The total value of all homes sold in the study period topped a half-billion dollars.

Predictably, when Yan’s study was published, a chorus of voices, including former developer Bob Ransford, jumped to criticize Yan: “The danger is intolerance, racism, singling out certain groups of people saying they’re to blame for this,” said Ransford. But such labels have failed to muffle the debate, particularly as more and more Chinese-Canadian voices have begun calling out white developers and academics for making the claim. Fung, the software engineer, says he’s among those “deeply pissed off” by what he considers a slur: “The only people claiming racism are white Anglo-Saxon males—that’s it. These are the same guys trying to label Andy Yan—whose grandparents paid the head tax—a racist? It’s absurd.”

That sentiment is shared by Ian Young, the South China Morning Post’s Vancouver correspondent and author of the popular Hongcouver blog. Young, who is ethnically Chinese and was raised in Australia and Hong Kong, says the issue is one of money, not of race. “What defines those people in terms of their behaviour here in Vancouver, and in terms of their impact on affordability, is not their ‘Chineseness,’ it’s their ‘millionaireness,’ ” he says. “The idea that there is commonality to be found in the Chineseness—I find that kind of insulting. Why would you think that someone was better defined by the colour of their skin than the colour of their money?”

This is why Fung believes it is so vitally important for Chinese-Canadian voices to encourage a debate over the impact of foreign investment on the local market. “Chinese people have a tendency to be a little quiet, we tend to want to not create ripples—culturally it’s something we’re not comfortable with.”

Source: Chinese real estate investors are reshaping the market

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Plenty of blame to go round in real estate crisis: Mason

2016/03/26 Leave a comment

The (valid) criticism of governments continues.

But at least, the planned StatsCan study will illustrate the extent to which (mainly Chinese) immigration has contributed to increased housing prices:

The B.C. government recently vowed to crack down on real estate agents involved in nefarious practices such as shadow flipping that help to drive up prices. But this is a small measure that will do absolutely nothing to improve affordability. Its primary purpose is to improve optics: Look, everyone, Premier Christy Clark is finally doing something about this mess. The Premier also asked B.C. Housing to look at the impact of foreign investment in the market.

In this week’s federal budget, meanwhile, $500,000 was set aside to help Statistics Canada determine the best way to collect data on international buyers.

It would be comical if it weren’t so sad.

Others, meanwhile, aren’t waiting. This week, two economists from the National Bank produced a study showing as many as one-third of house purchasers in Metro Vancouver last year were from China. But perhaps the most interesting numbers to be revealed lately concern the impact that the immigrant-investor program – both the one run for years by Ottawa (and terminated in 2014) and another that still exists in Quebec – has had on the real estate madness we are witnessing.

Under the program, immigrants can come to Canada in exchange for $800,000, up front, that serves as a five-year loan to the government. The report, brought to light by Ian Young of the South China Morning Post, reveals how completely porous and unaccountable the immigrant-investor system has been. Truly awful might be another way to describe it.

For example, after 10 years the average annual income tax paid by these millionaire migrant investors is $1,400. That compares with $7,500 for the average Canadian. The report notes that after five years, many of these investors have secured Canadian citizenship and returned to their home country.

Quebec accepts about 1,750 such applications annually. After handing over their $800,000, most move to Vancouver and buy real estate. The vast majority of all who have taken advantage of these programs over the years have ended up in British Columbia (by one estimate, nearly 200,000).

Those who have come to Canada acknowledged to federal researchers that their primary motivation for obtaining citizenship was as a hedge against political or economic upheaval occurring in their home country.

The federal government has known about the impact the investor pipeline was having on things such as real estate and didn’t care. It was more than pleased to sell Canadian citizenship to the wealthy. The B.C. government, meanwhile, is only too happy to take rich immigrants through the investor back door that continues to be provided by Quebec. It doesn’t care that it isn’t seeing any of the loan money that immigrant investors have to pay; it is making tens of millions from the insane escalation in real estate prices these immigrants have set off.

Canadians should be furious that their governments allowed this to happen. Now all that these same governments can do is introduce lame measures that will have no meaningful impact on housing prices, but rather are designed to show that government is on the problem!

Except they’re not. And never have been. And hopefully history will judge them harshly for that.

Source: Plenty of blame to go round in real estate crisis – The Globe and Mail

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Study likely to fuel debate on foreign home buyers

2016/03/25 Leave a comment

One of the small, low-cost, but important initiatives in the budget, along with some estimates from economists regarding the extent of the issue. Better data means better decisions:

New funding from Ottawa to help remedy what economists call an “astonishing lack of data” about international investment in Canadian real estate amounts to less than the down payment on an average detached house in Vancouver, despite signs the country’s most expensive housing markets are witnessing a significant influx of foreign buyers.

Responding to Tuesday’s federal budget, National Bank of Canada economists Peter Routledge, Parham Fini and Paul Poon estimate that the Liberal government’s promise of $500,000 for Statistics Canada to study the issue of foreign investment in the housing market amounts to just 27.5 per cent of the average $1.8-million price of a detached home in the Greater Vancouver Area. (It equates to just 18 per cent of the $2.87-million average price of a detached house in the City of Vancouver, or less than the required minimum 20-per-cent down payment.)

Still, they say the funding, enough for Statscan to spend one year examining ways to collect data on international buyers, is a welcome change to help address what has become a “politically delicate” issue in a country that prides itself on having an open economy and immigration system.

In an analysis that is likely to add fuel to that political debate, the economists conducted their own research showing that as many as one-third of all home purchases in the Vancouver region last year and 14 per cent in Toronto came from buyers in China.

Without any Canadian-specific data on foreign investors to go on, the economists came up with their estimates by extrapolating from two international surveys of realtors and buyers.

One is an annual report on the level of foreign home-buyer investment by the National Association of Realtors, based on surveys of real estate agents in the United States. It estimates that Chinese investors bought $28.6-billion (U.S.) of real estate in the U.S. housing market between March, 2014, and March, 2015, a seven-fold increase from the $4.1-billion they spent in 2009.

The second is a multiple-choice survey by the Financial Times of 77 wealthy Chinese investors who had bought real estate outside of China. Of those, 33.5 per cent said they bought homes in United States, while 11.7 per cent invested in Vancouver and 8.3 per cent in Toronto.

Combining the two surveys, the economists estimate that Chinese investors spent roughly $9-billion (Canadian) on home sales in the Greater Toronto Area last year, or 14 per cent of all total sales volume in the region.

In the Greater Vancouver Area, they estimate Chinese investors spent $12.7-billion – or 33 per cent of total sales. That figure, they say, lines up with research from B.C. urban planner Andy Yan, who found that 66 per cent of all sales of 172 detached homes in three west-side Vancouver neighbourhoods within a six-month period were to buyers with non-Anglicized Chinese names.

The economists admit their survey is somewhat unscientific, but say such attempts highlight the importance of collecting better data on the influence of foreign investment, and even immigration, on housing market affordability.

Source: Study likely to fuel debate on foreign home buyers – The Globe and Mail

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In British Columbia, a real-estate rage gets real

2016/03/19 Leave a comment

Understandable anger and fears.

The negligence of governments in not addressing the issue, starting with failing to address data gaps that leave space for anecdotes, along with a real estate industry  whose commission-based model only abets property flipping and escalating prices, it is no wonder that people are angry and fearful:

In the last six months, Eby, who unseated Premier Christy Clark in the last election—the kind of brass-knuckled political play rarely seen outside B.C.—has become B.C.’s most-watched opposition figure by skillfully assuming control of the housing debate.

Last November, the 38-year-old Vancouver-Point Grey MLA and former head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association helped a city researcher undertake a study showing that more than 70 per cent of homes sold in Vancouver’s West Side went to Mainland China buyers over a six-month period; remarkably, this was some of the first hard data illustrating the extent of foreign ownership in the local market.

For years, the debate relied mostly on anecdotal evidence. And anyone who dared suggest Chinese buyers were flooding the market was branded a racist—primarily by those with skin in the game, the city’s leading developers and condo marketers whose earnings soared as the market has climbed and climbed and climbed, unchecked. Screaming racism was an effective means to shutter the debate. Until now.

This could yet get ugly. Belcarra, and its “English-only” bylaw, is just the beginning. But in channeling rage over foreign buyers, wild speculative activity, shadow flipping, and realtor misconduct, Eby—rake-thin, young and passionate—has found a way to break the logjam, and tap into something deep and powerful in the psyche of residents of B.C.’s Lower Mainland, where the bulk of the province’s seats are found. There are few more powerful emotions in politics than anger. And for the first time in years, the NDP have found an issue with widespread appeal.

“People are really upset,” Eby said Wednesday night. “Their wages have no connection to the amount of money that is being charged for rent and for housing. People think their kids aren’t going to be able to afford to live here, they see the communities they love really no longer belonging to the community.”

“My younger child is sleeping in my bathroom,” said Jennifer Lloyd, a UBC researcher, who spoke after Eby. Lloyd and her husband, who both have PhDs and can only afford a tiny, rented condo for their family of four.

“This is not a generational issue, this is not a class issue,” said Lloyd. “I want to know that the virtues that I hold dear—hard work, educating ourselves, trying to better our lives—mean something in this city.”

It’s still far from clear that this surging anger risks unseating Clark, in an election slated for next spring. But right now, few are talking about the premier. And no one can seem to get enough of David Eby. One year before an expected election, that’s a dangerous place for the premier to be.

Source: In British Columbia, a real-estate rage gets real – Macleans.ca

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CMHC hits roadblocks in review of foreign owners

2016/03/16 Leave a comment

Suggests legislation might be needed given resistance of the realtors (too good a business line for them to be forthcoming on a voluntary basis?):

Canada’s national housing agency is focusing efforts to collect data on foreign real estate investors by studying temporary residents, including international students studying in Canada, as well as Canadian citizens who live abroad. But it has run into resistance in its attempt to ask real estate agents, developers and lawyers to voluntarily provide information on international clients.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s struggle to collect reliable data about foreign real estate investors is detailed in hundreds of pages of documents originally released to Bloomberg under Access to Information and subsequently provided to The Globe and Mail.

The agency’s first challenge was to settle on a definition of foreign investor. Its “final definition,” according to minutes of a January meeting, includes Canadian citizens whose permanent residence is in another country, along with what it calls “non-permanent residents.” They include temporary foreign workers, visitors to Canada and those with no legal ties to the country. They also include the more than 200,000 international students who are in Canada on study visas.

The inclusion of students as foreign investors was controversial even within the federal agency, with minutes of the meeting noting that “there was no unanimous agreement on whether foreign student buyers should be counted as foreign buyers or not.” CMHC is proposing to flag international students separately from other non-permanent residents.

The number of international students in Canada increased 36 per cent between 2010 and 2014, to nearly 212,000, according to Citizenship and Immigration data included in the CMHC documents. While the number who eventually apply for postgraduate work permits has risen from 10.9 per cent in 2010 to 17.6 per cent in 2014, “the large majority of students actually do not become permanent residents,” CMHC wrote. “This would justify classifying ‘student buyers’ as foreign buyers.”

There is no hard data on how many international students buy housing while studying in Canada, but real estate agents in Vancouver and Toronto often point to the fact that many foreign buyers, particularly those from China, buy housing here so that their children can go to school. “We feel some people, like students, are buying properties instead of renting with money mainly coming from outside Canada,” a CMHC analyst wrote in an internal exchange from early December.

The federal housing agency also drafted a proposal for a separate research project that would measure “the effects of non-permanent residents on housing demand.” It held discussions with HSBC Bank late last year about ways to collect data that would “allow identification of foreign mortgage applications,” along with Canada Revenue Agency, which requires non-resident homeowners to pay withholding taxes on rent and real estate sales.

One of the ways CMHC is proposing to collect data on foreign investors is a pilot project to survey real estate agents and developers about clients who might be considered foreign buyers, starting with Vancouver. The federal agency is also looking to include questions about the residency status of buyers and owners to its survey on condo owners and housing starts and hopes to work with provincial land registries to add data about foreign owners, starting in Ontario.

But it has run up against resistance from the real estate industry, with internal documents laying out that meetings with developers to discuss adding foreign residency questions to CMHC regular surveys of condo sales yielded “mixed results.”

“Some [condo] developers are willing to provide the information while others are not willing to provide it,” the agency wrote.

One real estate industry organization in B.C., the name of which was redacted in the CMHC documents, told the housing agency that it didn’t think its “members would be forthcoming with the information requested, despite knowing the background of their buyers.”

Source: CMHC hits roadblocks in review of foreign owners – The Globe and Mail

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