Vancouver vows to have vacant home tax by next year
One week after homeowners had to shell out the balance of their property taxes, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced initial steps the city and province are taking to implement a tax intended to temper the city’s white-hot housing market.
Monday’s announcement came hours after provincial finance minister Mike de Jong said the legislature will convene for a summer sitting on July 25 to enable Vancouver to enact the measures.
“[Housing] is a crisis right now,” Robertson said. “So far we’re not seeing any specific delivery. We’re seeing some initial steps, which is a positive thing, but we need a lot more follow through. We’re going to need significant action to address the market that has basically taken the option for home ownership, and even rental, away from many people in our city.”
Robertson offered few specifics Monday, other than to suggest a vacant home will be defined as being empty for 12 months per year.
At what rates those properties will be taxed remains to be determined, though any funds that come back to the city will be earmarked for affordable housing measures and creating incentives for property owners to boost local rental stocks.
The tax is expected to be introduced next year.
–John Kurucz, Vancouver Courier
Government's foreign buyer numbers way off according to Asian real estate conference
A provincial government statement that only 3 per cent of BC residential sales are made to foreign buyers and that Chinese nationals represent just 2.5 per cent of Metro Vancouver home buyers drew rolling eyeballs and laughter at the packed July 7 Asia Real Estate Association of America (AREAA) conference in downtown Vancouver.
“No. Absolutely not,” said an incredulous Byron Burley, Shanghai-based vice-president of Chinese-language Juwaii.com, China’s largest foreign residential real estate search engine. “It is way, way higher than that.” Burley noted that millions of Chinese nationals use his site, which has from 3,000 to 5,000 residential listings from BC at any time.
“My intuition says it has to be much higher [than 3 per cent],” said Michael North of the Asia Pacific Network Foundation, “just based on the number of people and the number of deals being done at this conference.”
North, COO of Hawaii-based Pacific Royalties, which specializes in linking North American real estate with Asian buyers, had just finished telling the conference that “a next wave of Chinese buyers” was about to crash into the Vancouver market.
“The rollout is accelerating,” North said, citing the recent expansion of China’s Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor program that encourages wealthy residents of China to invest in foreign real estate and stock markets.
“I would like to know where the BC government is getting their statistics,” said North, who estimated “at least 10 per cent” of Metro Vancouver home buyers are foreign nationals.
Finance Minister Mike De Jong said the information was based on residential sales during a near three-week period in June, which began as the province began tracking the addresses of all buyers for the first time. According to De Jong, there were 10,148 transactions between June 10 and 29 throughout BC, half of which were in the Lower Mainland. Only 337 of those sales — 3.3 per cent — involved foreign nationals.
Vancouver real estate agents were less cautious in their response to the government data.
“I would say 50 per cent of house buyers, maybe 60 per cent [are foreigners],” said Eve Chuang of Macdonald Realty. Chuang and other agents at the AREAA conference said it is not the nationality of the buyer but the source of the capital that is important. Money from China, the real estate agents said, can be transferred to a relative with an address in Vancouver, who then acts as the buyer.
–Frank O’Brien, Business in Vancouver
