The Dance Around Foreign Ownership of Vancouver RE

“..the City of Vancouver wants to collaborate with the provincial and federal governments to explore the viability of “restricting property ownership by non-permanent residents.”

That line appears in Vancouver’s 10-year housing strategy released Thursday, a comprehensive plan seeking to address all elements of the city’s housing crisis.

Upon learning the city’s new housing strategy proposes looking at restricting foreign ownership, Andy Yan told Postmedia: “It’s interesting … It’s the admission that you have a problem. As with many things in life, that’s the first step.”

“This does mark a bit of a sea change,” said Yan, now the director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program. “From the accusations that observers and critics are racists, to the realization that Vancouver does indeed sit in this global marketplace for residential real estate, through which local incomes can’t compete.”

The idea to investigate foreign ownership restrictions is one of a number of “tax and financial regulations to limit the commodification of housing and land for speculative investment” proposed in the city’s report, along with ideas like introducing a speculation and flipping tax, reforming federal and provincial tax regulations and seeking to “close loopholes.”

These proposals are designated as “high” priority in the city report, to be addressed in the first year of the 10-year plan.

Dan Garrison, Vancouver’s assistant director of housing policy, said Friday: “Our thinking on that has evolved in the last number of years … Whether it’s foreign ownership or investment from other sources, certainly that piece around investment driving housing costs is something that’s really ramped up in the public mind in the last couple of years.”

The city report raises the idea of investigating the examples of Australia and New Zealand, two countries where foreign ownership has been a red-button issue, that have both taken steps to limit foreign ownership.

B.C. Finance Minister Carole James is “reviewing the tax system and evaluating existing and proposed housing tax measures,” including the role of speculation in B.C.’s housing market, as part of the planning for the 2018 budget, James said Friday in an emailed statement.

“However,” James said, “a ban on foreign ownership of homes is not being considered as part of Budget 2018 planning. British Columbians are proud to welcome thousands of newcomers each year who help strengthen our province.”

– excerpt from ‘Sea change’: Vancouver considers ‘restricting property ownership by non-permanent residents’, Dan Fumano, Vancouver Sun 25 Nov 2017

Information From Outside The Vancouver RE Bubble – U.S. Senator Lives In (don’t laugh) $500K Home

The story ‘Rand Paul is tackled from behind and ATTACKED by his Democrat-voting doctor neighbor while mowing the lawn at his home in exclusive Kentucky gated community’ [Daily Mail, 4 Nov 2017] is weird from a number of perspectives, but, viewing it from the epicentre of the Vancouver RE cult, one truly bizarre piece of info leaped out at us… Rand Paul is a US senator, and his “exclusive Kentucky gated community home” (photo above) “is worth around $500,000”. Surely this cannot be correct! Somebody must have dropped a zero. Embarrassing.

“The Position Remains Unfilled”

“I have spent time in New York, London, San Francisco, Boston, as well as worked and interviewed in each. I also have discussed the experiences of multiple friends who used to live here and who now live in these places. Forget not being in the same ballpark. Vancouver isn’t even playing the same sport. All of those cities have far, far more opportunities than here – and far better compensation. The only thing Vancouver shares with them is high real estate prices.

Most people who have worked with executive search firms or are attempting to staff a mid-to-senior-level positions with non-local talent are having a devil of a time doing so. The most recent story I heard was at a friend’s company, where they were trying to staff a VP vacancy. The assessment of the outside international executive search team was that the proposed salary – based on the desired skill-set, the size of the organization, and the cost of living here – was around half a million short of where it needed to be. Yet the company simply didn’t have the ability to go higher. Thus, the position remains unfilled. I’ll grant you that there can be some alchemy that goes into the numbers used in these executive searches, but I have heard this same sort of shortfall in multiple other instances now.

You take a growing number of stories like those, stories about being unable to hire bar staff at $18/ hour, and everything in between – and you’re left with a failing community. The moment sharks start circling and making an actual concerted movement to entice young locals away – showing them just how much better they can do – this goes from being a gradually escalating problem to a full blown crisis in the private and public sector.”

– Royce McCutcheon, commenting at VREAA, 6 Nov 2017