http://business.financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/vancouver-home-sales-plunge-40-and-prices-are-beginning-to-follow Meanwhile, in Toronto, realtors released a study on Tuesday to fend off cries for a similar tax in Canada’s largest city. The study from TREB showed almost five per cent of purchases in the Greater Toronto Area can be traced to foreign buyers. What happens, as the Chinese exit one market, is they go somewhere else. That's why I've got five links to the fact that the Chinese property buyers moved from Vancouver to Seattle. Although it appears as if the Vancouver dip is short-lived and is gonna be back in spades: All of this comes from the two opposing functions of real estate: houses as places to live vs. houses as investment vehicles. That's one big problem of globalism: as rich people somewhere else get exposure to global markets, those global markets have to compete with rich people somewhere else for housing. The fact that they live somewhere else doesn't matter if the houses are sufficiently valuable as investment vehicles. In Vancouver's case, it was legislation that said, in no uncertain terms, that Chinese investment was not welcome. They aren't dumb questions: they get to the underpinnings of society. "how much should we discourage foreign ownership of domestic real estate" is fuckin' thinktank-level shit.The falling numbers come as Vancouver continues to grapple with the impact of a 15 per cent foreign property transfer tax the province began imposing in August. Last month, the British Columbia premier, Christy Clark, backtracked on her foreign tax by saying foreigners with work permits who live and work in B.C. would be exempted.
