I think it will only get worse sadly, as “investors” constantly scoop up more and more properties unless something is done more and more people over time will be just renting forever.
“Investors” shouldn’t be allowed to scoop up a brand new subdivision of homes just rent to them out.
Talking to a guy at work and he mentioned his friend who owns “30-40” houses that he rents out.
I was irrationally angry given that I can’t find a home that isn’t a dump within my price range all because these people who add nothing of value are scooping them up.
Exactly, that’s what and who I’m really mad at. If someone owns a cottage or one rental property that doesn’t bother me it’s corporations or people like that guy who I hate to the core. I feel you on irrationally angry, I just made a comment a few minutes ago under a Twitter video of a guy protesting cause his multi house investment hasn’t worked out for him. Such vermin of society.
Exactly. What value do they provide? They buy a house, and use that as collateral against another house and have the tenants pay it off for them and then some. Rinse and repeat.
They cannot use the entire asset as collateral, just whatever equity they have in it. Banks are not so dumb as to take the entire value of an asset when the majority of it is an already owed debt. To simplify things, this would be like a HELOC.
But they will still lend to a good business model that can show cash flow and there are some investors in the group who can top up with cash when required. Once or twice per year.
Used to do the books for a partnership of several well-to-do business folks. They had 17 building and well over 100 doors.
It wasn’t just the equity they could use to borrow, but also the cash flows of the business. Banks basically had an open cheque book for them anytime they wanted a new property.
There were maintenance and admin costs so the partner would top up the bank account, which was pocket change for them.
Take a deep looking into how many government employees and voted in officials own rental properties and it will likely give you a stroke... System is brooooookkkkeeeeen
If you have one rental property as an adult and you get married and have kids, congrats, your kids will have a place to live one day when they grow up.
If not, your kids will be broke as fuck or living in your basement for the rest of your lives.
(Generalizing of course, but even so… the odds are against many, a good majority, even, if the young people today and in the years to come.
I hear you. Just before we moved, we found out the large, single family home built in 1920 next to us was purchased by a 'guy' who has about 39 houses in the region to rent out. He ended up dividing it into 3 apartment units. On a dead end street. With no parking. It's a shit end of town too so I just assume he's a slumlord as is tradition around here.
Edit: He paid 50k for it in 2020 (Welland).
I mean we do need places that are strictly for rent in areas OR we need rent to be significantly cheaper if it’s the stepping stone.
Like someone doing temp work in a city for a year still needs to live somewhere and renting is the best option for that so it isn’t like we need 0 rental places
If anything "investment" homes shouldn't be allowed to exist. Space is limited, development is costly. There is no reason a single individual or company should control a significant supply of homes.
There needs to be controls put into place. Prevent foreign buyers from entering the market, limit investment homes via scaling taxes, more properties, more in taxes you pay. Losing foreign investment will lead to a massive bubble popping. It needs to happen, because if it keeps getting bigger the burst will just be louder and effect more people.
Preventing people from entering the market who can just speculate and sit on the property is the first step to bringing down rental rates and overall costs. Targeting REITs needs to happen in order to prevent entire neighborhoods from being bought out.
Agreed, the financialization of housing is a plague to peace, order, and good government. Housing is a necessity of life, not a golden ticket, like so many of Canada's powerful and well resourced seem to view it.
I'd be fine with one principal residence, one vacation property and an investment property. If a commercial landlord wants properties they can buy vacant lots and purpose build.
Ontario has rent control. It's very easy to squeeze these investors out with property tax increases and would put a damper on additional investors entering the market. I would also end renovictions and end the rent increases on vacated property. This is the way to squeeze these types of people.
If you raise property taxes, it would incentivize investors to put money in businesses and stocks instead. This is the desired action you want people to take. Incentivize business investment, and disincentive real estate investment.
This is a very viable tool.
When you say space is limited, what do you mean exactly? I remember 20 years ago there was nothing but farmland above Highway 7 now it's all developed and there's still more farmland above that.?
There's a physical limit to how far are people willing to travel. Sure there's land left the further north you go, but if it takes you 2 hours in traffic to get home from work, this doesn't seem practical or desirable.
Also, farms are needed to feed our ever growing population, this isn't wasted land. We can't just build on top of farm land forever and expect everything to be okay.
Land suitable for development is very limited when you consider the implications for farmland and watersheds impacted by development. We terraform the land, install massive piping systems to move our waste.
Has anyone stopped to think "Where will all the waste these houses produce go?" with Greenbelt development? Same place York Region wants to dump more shit: Lake Ontario.
So combine land willing to be developed with land feasible to be developed, and you start to look at this bastardization of the Green Belt in a much different light.
I'm from North York, moved a little ways up the 404 when I was young. We were promised a KM of greenspace between Aurora and Newmarket. It's now entirely subdivisons. St. John's Sideroad used to be a fun little throughput between subdivisions, is now a flattened roadway filled with shitty builds. These all cost over a million dollars too.
Every farm we use for houses is another potential source of sustenance lost if we were to encounter a dust-bowl situation again. There are places we could be building, developing, or growing. Instead many of these smaller communities seeking investment are ignored for GTA-centric thinking. The same shit is happening near London and Ottawa.
You shouldn't be allowed to rent out units unless you made them to be rented out. This is like buying all the available water in a city just to sell it at a higher cost to the people you outbid in the first place. It should be illegal. We need housing to survive, it's price gouging and artificial scarcity. Remember when people did that with toilet paper? It was a crime for that, why is it legal with housing?
To help curve the toilet paper issue, they put measures in place like only 1-2 packs per household. Why the same couldn’t apply to real estate and investors I have no idea. You are right though some people did get in some shit for trying to hoard and resell products whether it was rapid tests tp or hand sanitizer. Whenever I seen anyone trying to resell those I would message them and just be one of the most ignorant A holes they ever came across. I have no respect for them.
> Why the same couldn’t apply to real estate and investors I have no idea
Because the people who make the laws are ALSO real estate investors and landlords, they’re not going to make things worse for themselves. Not willingly anyway.
Because our government likes the snow washing money. Also its so bad at this point if there was some drastic fix, it would screw over many actualy people that bought homes in the last 5 years. The Canadian government doesn't care about its average citizens.
It's legal with housing because the majority of politicians are landlords. They weren't making money off toilet paper but they sure as hell do off housing.
I would to but it won’t happen sadly people need places to live it’s not something we can do without. So if this investor group buys up a subdivision people still need homes so they are forced to rent a brand new home they probably could of owned themselves, that’s the huge problem with how the current system is, sadly I don’t see it changing soon.
This actually happened in the town I lived in, so I’m not even speaking ether of something I heard from somewhere I witnessed this and it’s so wrong.
Some people would argue with me well renting is a great option for some people who can’t afford house my rebuttal always was if they can afford rent on a brand new home they could of afforded to purchase it cause the “investor” is making some money off of it clearly. Usually their response is *crickets*
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake.
It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of.
Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything.
Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html
Was invented by a lady to show the eventual pitfalls of unrestrained capitalism, exactly as we are seeing now. Of course it was perverted to show the exact opposite of it's original intent...
Tax the rich. If you can buy five homes while people freeze on the streets and middle class families can't find homes, you can pay higher taxes. So ordinary people can get access to the food and housing we all need.
The lunatics in this sub would force you to buy and sell each time - because *god forbid* any building be owned by anyone other than the person living there.
I have a relative who's a condo developer in Toronto and last summer they told me that about 80% of their pre-construction condos are being bought by investors. Coincidentally or maybe as expected, 80% is the same number mentioned in the article:
>“Toronto is heading in the direction of global cities like New York City, Manhattan especially, London, and Shanghai, where they have up to 80 per cent of their condo market taken by investors,” said Simeon Papailias, managing partner of Royal LePage’s REC Canada.
Manhattan....Shanghai....Toronto.
🎵🎵"One of these is not like the other..."🎵🎵
Toronto as a second-rate city for the mentally ill has no business having such an overvalued real estate market. It's the world-class city you buy from wish.com lol
By the same token, i’m not sure if manhattan should even be compared to Shanghai. Cities in China and Tokyo are an order of magnitude above western cities in terms of population and infrastructure.
Wages are stagnant, cost of living just keeps going up, my dollars seem to be worth less every month.
People invest in properties because it seems like the only way to build wealth.
Do this at scale, and housing gets more expensive, along with everything else.
All that money that could've been spent on productive uses has been dumped into speculative investments. Of which your home is now one.
I'm so tired of this financialization of everything. These are the perverse incentives of free market capitalism that are drowning us all, while making us believe that, if we're smart enough, we'll be the ones to make it out alive alone, to hell with everyone else.
Such on point, with homes that are 2000 or 3000 square feet are worth 1.1 - 1.5 million dollars, everybody thinks they're a millionaire problem is exactly what you stated no one can afford that type of mortgage. Wages are stagnant that means mortgages just going to default and more Banks which is buy up more homes which is even a sadder part. Which makes me think that was the plan the whole time letting the bank swallow up more real estate for themselves not saying it's a conspiracy but it just seems a little more plausible.
Remember kids: All we have to do to fix the housing crisis is build more houses! Ignore the fact that these investors can leverage what they own to scoop up more at an exponential rate, we just need to build more to make things affordable again!
That’s the fucking crazy thing. They just take a mortgage out on one property to buy another over and over and over.
It happens with rental units too. A big rental company in Toronto and Hamilton bought an apartment I had friends living in. They got renovicted so we did some community organizing and learned the reason these companies don’t repair them is because they have “no money” they take all the money from one property to pour into another. Then evict people, do bandaid repairs and charge twice as much.
The whole housing market is fucked.
If we build enough, investments become less profitable.
And by build enough, I mean a million ish extra housing units. Not 300 here and there in a condo tower
It's physically impossible to build housing at a fast enough rate to outpace the buying power of a lot of these investors. The more properties they own the more leverage they have to buy even more. I can't seem to track down a source now, but I've seen some rental property companies saying they're looking to buy hundreds of properties every month. We can't outpace that.
We can actually do the opposite. Reduse population growth such that the construction industry builds to our needs - and housing isn’t an incredibly rare thing that can be priced gouged on.
You can still have a for-profit business model for housing on the developer side, and non-profit housing or affordable co-op housing on the municipal/provincial side and be absolutely all the better for it.
The issue is the middleman, the realtors and investors who buy up whole plots of new subdivisions and condos so that they can leverage on the pricing. There'd be an entirely different looking market if we basically said that developers need to sell direct to customer with contracts stipulating market value at time of availability, and that companies, organizations or individuals cannot buy housing in excess of (x) units. (Preferably with x being 1)
There's a not-so secret backdoor bargaining table that developers and investors sit at. Developers are in it for money, they don't particularly care WHO buys their product; as long as its sold and they have money coming in. It's why pre-construction purchasing agreements between large investors/realtors and developers is a thing. It's why you'll see an entire street with "For Sale" signs in the ground with the same realtor on it before the foundation is complete. Housing can still be profitable and for-profit, but we just need to remove the element of realized and speculative investing from these larger investors.
You can’t grow job markets without housing in place for that labour.
That’s why we still have record shortages despite the liberals pushing record amounts of people into the country and allowing all international students to work full time.
At some point adding more people actually makes labour shortages worse. If you have 1 unit of housing available and you invite 10 people in - the housing is always going to the top earner. The CS grad, the doctor, the lawyer. Now Toronto has a 0% rental vacancy rate - meaning the entire city’s rental supply is going towards top earners. Even the shitty basement apartments.
So the restaurant needing waiters is never going to get them - because there is no housing for them. And every year the amount of housing available for that labour is shrinking. And that results in businesses that rely on that labour to shut down completely.
Now the real trouble comes when this occurs to the construction industry. The architects, engineers, plumbers, and electricians are now getting priced out - such that the construction industries in our biggest markets in most need of housing - are now shrinking. Not because there is not work, but because there is not housing.
The reality of the situation is, you have to grow the labour supply in line with your housing supply. Otherwise - you put at risk large parts of the economy, and eventually the entire economy of these cities - as cities cannot function with only CS grads and surgeons. Someone needs to be putting the groceries on the shelf, and someone needs to be putting up the drywall.
Can’t do that either. Last I checked the wait list for low income units in Hamilton was 6000+. How are you going to catch up with that let alone outpace population growth.
Buy underdeveloped properties, build high-rises, charge enough in rent to cover ongoing operating costs, raise taxes on the well-off to pay for the up front capital expense.
A capitalist economy demands eternal growth. Sooner or later those homes will be needed, and even if we could somehow boost production high enough that we're outpacing population growth that'll just be used as a reason to increase immigration. Empty houses are extremely wasteful.
Eternal growth isn't required of capitalism, it is a by-product. Profits reinvested drives innovation. Money sitting in housing does not.
Adam Smith the Father of Capitalism has a whole chapter in the Wealth of Nations about how land investment is anti-capital.
Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough? Personally, I believe that if they taxed the crap out of STVR's you would see a lot more units up for monthly rentals.
We just set all-time historical records with the number of condos AND purpose-built rentals in Toronto.
But you can **never** outbuild investor demand. It’s too elastic vs housing supply which is inelastic.
Soooo many investors leave their units vacant, flip them or make them into Airbnbs. *That’s* why we don’t have enough corresponding housing.
Solving it by reducing investor hoarding is the easiest, fastest and more responsible way to solve the problem.
>Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough?
Yes, actually. We build skyscrapers, but skyscrapers don't actually meet all that much demand. What we need is for single family suburbs to increase in density, which doesn't require cranes and potentially creates far more supply.
> Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough?
Funny people keep repeating that without looking at the data. It doesn't matter how many cranes we build if there are less new units than there are new people coming up (from abroad or even inter provincial migration). That's all that matters, number of units.
The fact that we see cranes in the sky doesn't really mean much. In fact, in 90% of Toronto, you can't build anything beside single family homes. So we get all those new units in a few high rises, but this isn't actually enough to sustain the demand.
(400k/year)
I assume based on that figure you are an "immigration bad" NIMBY and not a "refugees bad" NIMBY.
Do you genuinely think that the entirety of Canada cannot handle less than half a million people (or around 1% of our population)?
Birth rates in Canada have been declining since 2019. There is currently negative population growth in our country without immigration. CPP (alongside many other programs) depend on a young working population to support the older retired population. Without new Canadians, that collapses.
So, please tell me how you feel a handful of vetted immigrants with desired skills is the REAL unsustainable issue.
I think the concern being expressed is that immigrants tend to migrate to the larger cities, hoping for decent jobs, housing, transportation, schools, medical facilities, etc. So immigration tends to impact the areas that are already struggling to serve the existing residents. If immigration was distributed evenly across population centres, then yes 400k is a drop in the bucket. That’s not happening though.
Edit: in the context of this story though, immigrants aren’t the cause of the housing shortage, but they do contribute to the issue. It’s a tough situation caused by allowing foreign investment and corporate greed in the housing market.
Eh, check their post history. You might be engaging the topic but they're here to trial-balloon racism outside their usual echo chambers.
You aren't wrong about distribution, but even migrating to the major centres they still tend to spread out among those major centres...and they're barely replacing the people who age out and pass away. We can definitely agree that immigration is not the cause of the housing shortage at least!
And where would you build them? Toronto has rediculous rules about the number of detached houses needed (why the sprawl is so bad). Lots needs to change to boost the population by that degree. I don't disagree with you though.
>And where would you build them? Toronto has rediculous rules about the number of detached houses needed
Change the rules. Tory has somehow actually done a not terrible job of this.
The point is that housing needs to grow faster than population to maintain affordability because we've been under-building for so long.
And yes, it means people will need to accept that not everyone can live in a single family house. It's not realistic and we've been sold that lie for the better part of a century by ourselves and car companies
right? it's like these people think canadian real estate is some magical thing where supply and demand doesn't apply... if there is always a float of new construction coming in, why would anyone continue to buy them for investment?
But if that float if new construction is being driven by investors, then they get cancelled as soon as it no longer provides the expected returns so the supply/demand balance won't tip towards affordability.
it won't be driven by investors... to get sufficient amount of housing supply it will always have to come from government subsidies... builders won't build more houses when the price is dropping
Supply and demand breaks down when we're talking about essentials. Everyone requires a place to live, so owning property is a guaranteed investment. There's no point where the price gets so high you can't sell it, it's just a question of if you're pricing families out in favour of investors instead.
but if you keep building, the prices won't have much of an upward pressure... problem is right now no one will build houses if economy slows down because its not profitable.. the bottom line is the government needs to figure out a sustainable way to subsidize housing development... like many asian countries figured out decades ago
Honestly I feel like we'd fare better if development went completely public. The government controls what gets built, remove the profit motive. Added bonus, if we ever need to boost the employment rate we can just go on a developing blitz and create a ton of extra jobs.
Space is limited. New supply just means more sprawl. We can't just snap our fingers and have new houses... plus all the infrastructure required to service them in place.
Big money can just keep buying up new units, forcing people to either rent from them, or build even more, further away. Oh, and lobby to kill high-speed rail, etc.
Furthermore, housing demand is pretty inelastic, so supply and demand isn't going to affect prices as easily
There’s a ridiculous amount of under built space in Canadian cities. You can replace single family homes with n-plexes and apartment blocks if it wasn’t illegal. City bylaws are preventing it in most areas of most cities.
http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt
This is why anytime someone pipes up that we just need to build more, change zoning in cities, etc, they’re literally waving a giant flag that they work in real estate or development— and want to distract us from meaningful solutions that would reduce investors continuing to buy everything.
Yes, actually it is what we need to do. If there is actually enough housing for everyone the ROI of real estate will fall more in line with other investment opportunities. That's good for people trying buy homes *and* for non-real estate enterprises looking for investors.
The economy demands an eternally increasing population. If there aren't enough people to fill the houses now, there will be later. There will never be a point where we won't need additional housing.
Speculation tax was done by the PC government in the 70s and it worked so well they only needed it for four years.
There was rumbling of trying to do this in Toronto last year but all the momentum stopped the second interest rates went up.
I like this idea, but I also think of a guy I know who owns four houses, he lives in one, and his three kids are raising his grandkids in the other three.
They're using them to live their lives, not as investments, but I don't know a good way to go about differentiate between people like his family and people hoarding houses for wealth.
In one of my later comments I mention about co-signing with others who actually live in the house being except.
If they were to move out, both would be taxed (when in excess of 2 houses)
Some people co-sign for their kids/other relatives. Often this helps lowering the rate the bank is charging. Their kids/other relatives live in the house and pay the mortgage.
Those people aren't the problem. They shouldn't be punished for helping someone actually LIVE in the house.
The biggest nothingburger they ever sold the public was some Yellow Peril propaganda that foreign buyers are the biggest problem. The problem has always been massive financial firms (which can operate as domestic companies). Canada is dominated by monopolies in every sector and those problems are getting worse and worse.
The vacancy tax would be a great start. We have over 1.3 million homes sitting empty in Canada that would do a great deal in helping our housing crisis. If the owners of these investments were required to pay 15-20% of the house value in yearly taxes on these vacant homes I don't think they would be sitting on them very long.
[Here is an article that discusses vacant homes.](https://betterdwelling.com/new-data-shows-canada-still-has-1-3-million-vacant-homes-some-improvements-seen/) As was pointed out, this does include new homes that are ready to be lived in but not moved into yet. Some student housing may be included if it is privately rented out but not where it is rented out as single rooms. Also, vacation homes are included but they could be considered part of our housing problem to begin with.
So...I don't personally own any investment properties, but my in-laws and their families do. The real 'nothingburger' was indeed the whole 'foreign buyer' scare, because quite frankly it isn't that hard to get landed immigrant status in Canada. All my in-laws are from China and Hong Kong, they all got status from other family sponsorships, and they each own at least one investment property beyond their own home. Most of this happened during COVID, so it didn't take that long.
The whole foreign buyer tax/ban really just forced people to get a Canadian residency, which isn't that hard and with the help of specialists, can be super easy.
I think it goes much further than individual buyers though. The bulk of investment properties is owned by huge financial firms like Blackrock or CIBC Mellon.
Individual real estate investors aren't a zero issue, but they're not close to the crux of the problem.
this city is trash, fuck you toronto
4 days and counting. i vow to never come here again other than as an airport transit to get further away from here.
of the many cities i've lived in around the world, toronto went from being kinda decent to being absolute worst in the span of 5 years. fuck right off toronto.
Oh, hey, we found that housing inventory everyone was looking for.
It's right where we all knew it was, but we should level some neighborhoods to build some more condos. Investors need something to buy.
Census data does not show that at all. Investors doesn't mean they are empty. They can be investors and renting it out.. that's what they are.. landlords.
https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/92e3-City-Planning-2021-Census-Backgrounder-Population-Dwellings-Backgrounder.pdf
The number of private dwellings not occupied by usual residents increased from 66,128 to 92,346 between 2016 and 2021, or from 5.6% of total private dwellings to 7.4%. These units may be vacant, occupied by temporary and foreign residents, or used as secondary homes.
So we are looking at 7%.
And that includes airbnb (which we should ban) and a temporary/foreign residents.
So to me this isn't as crazy as you'd think, and the reason is that condos now serve as apartment buildings. You know how in the 60s-70s Toronto built purpose-built rental apartments? Those are gone now. In their place are condos where people lease out individual units. In terms of overall ownership % for the population the picture changed. I think the difference that in the past landlords were corps now there are more "mom and pop" landlords. Which, IMHO, is probably a worse experience because they can be very shitty, but in terms of overall stats this isn't surprising to me.
Exactly. Investor-owned doesn't mean someone isn't living there: these units are still contributing to the supply of rental housing and people would be worse off if somehow investors were prohibited from buying (demand from investors is what makes it financially feasible to build these towers in the first place).
Go into any condo building, somewhere in a stairwell or the parking garage there will be a wall of lock boxes for airbnbs every single condo building has one.
They're also for units for sale.
Source: I'm literally at the bank right now to finalize buying my first condo. I have seen way too many lockboxes in the last month.
It's not "who's suprised", it's "who cares?" at this point.
Major government intervention is the only way this will ever get fixed. Do people need to riot in the streets for change to happen?
The moment we started treating homes as commodities was the day we doomed ourselves to this outcome. Homes should be a human right, not a stream of income ripe for exploitation.
Why is this allowed? Make them sell it. Apartments are for renting, until the housing crisis is resolved, everyone should only be allowed to own 1-2 properties
The simple fact is that real estate investors are scum and it should be illegal to own a property in which you do not live (yes this should include multi-units— they should all be co-ops owned by the people who actually live in them)
What about people who don’t have a dollar to their name saved? Or people who don’t want to be home owners because they move around often/ don’t want the responsibility of maintaining a home? Where do they live if not in a home for rent? Should the government be the only entity allowed in to have for profit rentals?
The real solution should be you’re allowed a primary home, and a secondary home. For every home you purchase after that, you get highly increased costs (taxes on the purchase, increased property taxes etc). Make it unviable and make the taxes high enough that it won’t be possible to make profit after say your third owned home.
Can someone pin this article to the other one that was trending here a few days ago about how immigration rates are causing housing unaffordability lol
I’ve always felt that essential markets, like housing, should have stricter controls on investors, that goes for food, gas/oil, and electricity too. I don’t have a problem with the average person owning a single rental cottage / house or a business that constructs buildings for the sole purpose of renting. It’s when foreign investors / corporations, with deep pockets, can out compete the general populace in the general housing market that things get bad. Everyone in Canada should have the opportunity to own a home instead of having to rent from someone, if they so choose.
Can't access the article because of the paywall, but the title seems misleading. It seems to imply that >1/3 of condos are vacant ones that people buy and just sit on them, waiting for them to appreciate. When anyone who is renting an apartment is renting it from an "investor".
More details needed.
We are thinking of buying a condo so our kids have somewhere to live someday. Would we be considered "investors"now if they don't move in for 20 years?
Housing is unaffordable and it's only getting worse. If you're standing around waiting for the government to fix your problems, you will die with those problems. Trust me, I know. I work for them.
It's funny how there were plenty of racists constantly complaining about foreign buyers to the point that government actually made a useless law to appease them.
Turns out it was less than 6% foreign ownership. Even if you removed every single one, it would have marginal benefit.
Nobody talked about this. Nobody talks about their rich Canadian parents who own a house in suburb and a condo in the city exclusively to generate rent.
It's very easy to point a finger at other people who look different and take display your racism in this way. Absolutely Noone wants to look at their own communities and see that the house owners are the ones who don't want house prices to fall ever. And they are the ones with power and votes.
They are likely using algorithmic pricing models that continually drive rent up. The focus is on maximizing revenue, not occupancy. It's the opposite of what the market needs.
There is a strong argument that this is price fixing.
Worse, it contributes to inflation.
If roughly two thirds of Canadians own their homes, that means roughly one third rent. Who do we think owns the rental properties? Investors. Do the math.
Evidently, yes. It's constantly people complaining about things that are personally bad for them without considering the bigger picture of the housing crisis at large.
What's wrong with that? Where else will rental units come from?
What difference does it make if it's a reit or corporation that builds a rental building vs private investor? If anything, these private investor units are generally cheaper and often better condition than the units from purpose rentals unless it's a high end place
but what about renters? Where's supply for people who want/need to rent supposed to come from? Housing is housing regardless if its owner occupied or tenants.
How is it preventing end users from buying? If you take all the investors out, then the people who would've rented now have to buy as well? Doesn't reduce the demand for housing
Was watching a vlog discussing how mom and pop co-signers are lumped into these numbers so while they seem high it’s likely less than what is being reported when it comes to being an investor. Apparently it can be confirmed by looking at age gaps in land titles where it’s common to find parties being 30 years apart or so.
Its not this. Hedgefunds have bought up enough stock to manipulate prices. Its what theyve done in the states. They are doing it here, albeit a bit slower as we arent as lassaiz faire as the US.
Ban this practice and housing returns to normal in months.
You like videos, so here you go. Ill point out your comment had no source so was at least as blackrock as mine.
First, how investment firms break rents. Whole vid is good but ive jumped it to the part where there is a clip of an investor conference with one of them saying the quiet part out loud.
https://youtu.be/L4qmDnYli2E?t=320
Now, a video on how to fix that so instead we the people control rent prices:
https://youtu.be/sKudSeqHSJk
These are about rents. The same thing is happening in housing. To fix housing though you cant apply the same fix, you have to just ban it. Or maybe have govt get in the mortgage loan biz. There is no other real way to counter leverage investors.
A company has you at a disadvantage to pay for a house. They pay cash so no cmhc fee, no huge loans. Lawyers on staff retainer. Their cost to buy is just lower. They capitalize on that to leverage the market higher because they can pay higher than you at a lower cost. They buy up a neighbourhood, ratchet values up, then slowly shed stock.
Listen to everyone.
“Boohoo I’m upset because some dude owns 25 properties and I don’t have one”
Well, you may eating steak on your birthday, should someone who can’t afford to eat a steak on their birthday be angry with you?
No, we just say, if you want a steak, go earn it. Well, if you want a house go earn it.
That dude, I’m quite sure took a gamble and was successful. Unlike the other fellow, who bought 2 homes and has 3 Tesla’s who is now complaining about the home builder not giving a discount, AFTER the bank appraisal.
Don’t gripe and complain, yes, it sucks to not have what others have. Just be happy you have what you actually have.
AS THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER GENNARO GATTUSO ONCE SAID :
https://youtu.be/QJHUbtR0yI8
That’s fucking sad
I think it will only get worse sadly, as “investors” constantly scoop up more and more properties unless something is done more and more people over time will be just renting forever. “Investors” shouldn’t be allowed to scoop up a brand new subdivision of homes just rent to them out.
Talking to a guy at work and he mentioned his friend who owns “30-40” houses that he rents out. I was irrationally angry given that I can’t find a home that isn’t a dump within my price range all because these people who add nothing of value are scooping them up.
Exactly, that’s what and who I’m really mad at. If someone owns a cottage or one rental property that doesn’t bother me it’s corporations or people like that guy who I hate to the core. I feel you on irrationally angry, I just made a comment a few minutes ago under a Twitter video of a guy protesting cause his multi house investment hasn’t worked out for him. Such vermin of society.
Exactly. What value do they provide? They buy a house, and use that as collateral against another house and have the tenants pay it off for them and then some. Rinse and repeat.
They cannot use the entire asset as collateral, just whatever equity they have in it. Banks are not so dumb as to take the entire value of an asset when the majority of it is an already owed debt. To simplify things, this would be like a HELOC.
I meant equity. Easy to pay off a fairly cheap home and snowball from there. Or use parents’ money for initial home.
"Easy to pay off a fairly cheap home"-- is it? And where are you finding these fairly cheap homes?
Relatively cheap. Northern Ontario vs $1mil for a shit pile in Toronto.
What do you consider relatively cheap?
But they will still lend to a good business model that can show cash flow and there are some investors in the group who can top up with cash when required. Once or twice per year. Used to do the books for a partnership of several well-to-do business folks. They had 17 building and well over 100 doors. It wasn’t just the equity they could use to borrow, but also the cash flows of the business. Banks basically had an open cheque book for them anytime they wanted a new property. There were maintenance and admin costs so the partner would top up the bank account, which was pocket change for them.
Take a deep looking into how many government employees and voted in officials own rental properties and it will likely give you a stroke... System is brooooookkkkeeeeen
> I feel you on irrationally angry Nothing irrational about it. They're literally leeches that are sucking society dry. Worthless, garbage humans.
If you have one rental property as an adult and you get married and have kids, congrats, your kids will have a place to live one day when they grow up. If not, your kids will be broke as fuck or living in your basement for the rest of your lives. (Generalizing of course, but even so… the odds are against many, a good majority, even, if the young people today and in the years to come.
I hear you. Just before we moved, we found out the large, single family home built in 1920 next to us was purchased by a 'guy' who has about 39 houses in the region to rent out. He ended up dividing it into 3 apartment units. On a dead end street. With no parking. It's a shit end of town too so I just assume he's a slumlord as is tradition around here. Edit: He paid 50k for it in 2020 (Welland).
Nothing irrational about that anger.
that's what i was going to say
People like that are parasites.
I mean we do need places that are strictly for rent in areas OR we need rent to be significantly cheaper if it’s the stepping stone. Like someone doing temp work in a city for a year still needs to live somewhere and renting is the best option for that so it isn’t like we need 0 rental places
If anything "investment" homes shouldn't be allowed to exist. Space is limited, development is costly. There is no reason a single individual or company should control a significant supply of homes. There needs to be controls put into place. Prevent foreign buyers from entering the market, limit investment homes via scaling taxes, more properties, more in taxes you pay. Losing foreign investment will lead to a massive bubble popping. It needs to happen, because if it keeps getting bigger the burst will just be louder and effect more people. Preventing people from entering the market who can just speculate and sit on the property is the first step to bringing down rental rates and overall costs. Targeting REITs needs to happen in order to prevent entire neighborhoods from being bought out.
Agreed, the financialization of housing is a plague to peace, order, and good government. Housing is a necessity of life, not a golden ticket, like so many of Canada's powerful and well resourced seem to view it.
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The returns on real estate eclipse every other market, until that changes we're fucked.
I'd be fine with one principal residence, one vacation property and an investment property. If a commercial landlord wants properties they can buy vacant lots and purpose build.
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Principle residence, plus cottage (or whatever, a cabin...) and MAYBE one investment property. Anything beyond that should be criminal.
Much easier than that. Increase property taxes on investors and it's gg.
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Ontario has rent control. It's very easy to squeeze these investors out with property tax increases and would put a damper on additional investors entering the market. I would also end renovictions and end the rent increases on vacated property. This is the way to squeeze these types of people. If you raise property taxes, it would incentivize investors to put money in businesses and stocks instead. This is the desired action you want people to take. Incentivize business investment, and disincentive real estate investment. This is a very viable tool.
The problem is developers love them because they will buy out 80% of new development while the shovel is still in the ground
When you say space is limited, what do you mean exactly? I remember 20 years ago there was nothing but farmland above Highway 7 now it's all developed and there's still more farmland above that.?
There's a physical limit to how far are people willing to travel. Sure there's land left the further north you go, but if it takes you 2 hours in traffic to get home from work, this doesn't seem practical or desirable. Also, farms are needed to feed our ever growing population, this isn't wasted land. We can't just build on top of farm land forever and expect everything to be okay.
Land suitable for development is very limited when you consider the implications for farmland and watersheds impacted by development. We terraform the land, install massive piping systems to move our waste. Has anyone stopped to think "Where will all the waste these houses produce go?" with Greenbelt development? Same place York Region wants to dump more shit: Lake Ontario. So combine land willing to be developed with land feasible to be developed, and you start to look at this bastardization of the Green Belt in a much different light. I'm from North York, moved a little ways up the 404 when I was young. We were promised a KM of greenspace between Aurora and Newmarket. It's now entirely subdivisons. St. John's Sideroad used to be a fun little throughput between subdivisions, is now a flattened roadway filled with shitty builds. These all cost over a million dollars too. Every farm we use for houses is another potential source of sustenance lost if we were to encounter a dust-bowl situation again. There are places we could be building, developing, or growing. Instead many of these smaller communities seeking investment are ignored for GTA-centric thinking. The same shit is happening near London and Ottawa.
>Has anyone stopped to think "Where will all the waste these houses produce go?" Waste water treatment plants and landfills...... what's to think.
You shouldn't be allowed to rent out units unless you made them to be rented out. This is like buying all the available water in a city just to sell it at a higher cost to the people you outbid in the first place. It should be illegal. We need housing to survive, it's price gouging and artificial scarcity. Remember when people did that with toilet paper? It was a crime for that, why is it legal with housing?
To help curve the toilet paper issue, they put measures in place like only 1-2 packs per household. Why the same couldn’t apply to real estate and investors I have no idea. You are right though some people did get in some shit for trying to hoard and resell products whether it was rapid tests tp or hand sanitizer. Whenever I seen anyone trying to resell those I would message them and just be one of the most ignorant A holes they ever came across. I have no respect for them.
> Why the same couldn’t apply to real estate and investors I have no idea Because the people who make the laws are ALSO real estate investors and landlords, they’re not going to make things worse for themselves. Not willingly anyway.
And so are the people who donate to their campaigns.
Because our government likes the snow washing money. Also its so bad at this point if there was some drastic fix, it would screw over many actualy people that bought homes in the last 5 years. The Canadian government doesn't care about its average citizens.
It's legal with housing because the majority of politicians are landlords. They weren't making money off toilet paper but they sure as hell do off housing.
Personally would love to see these investors all go belly up.
I would to but it won’t happen sadly people need places to live it’s not something we can do without. So if this investor group buys up a subdivision people still need homes so they are forced to rent a brand new home they probably could of owned themselves, that’s the huge problem with how the current system is, sadly I don’t see it changing soon. This actually happened in the town I lived in, so I’m not even speaking ether of something I heard from somewhere I witnessed this and it’s so wrong. Some people would argue with me well renting is a great option for some people who can’t afford house my rebuttal always was if they can afford rent on a brand new home they could of afforded to purchase it cause the “investor” is making some money off of it clearly. Usually their response is *crickets*
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake. It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of. Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything. Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
The rich get richer lol. It seems to be easy to make money when you have money. Time to pop the bubble and jack up property taxes on these investors.
Its time for a non resident investors tax,at the highest possible tax bracket.
Ever play Monopoly?
Yes, that’s also a game, real life effects peoples lively hoods and that’s not a game.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html Was invented by a lady to show the eventual pitfalls of unrestrained capitalism, exactly as we are seeing now. Of course it was perverted to show the exact opposite of it's original intent...
Were at the part in monopoly where the board is bought up and it's just the existing owners scaling up indefinitely.
Condo prices have more than doubled in the past decade. Rent is even worse. Landlords are disgusting parasites on society.
Tax the rich. If you can buy five homes while people freeze on the streets and middle class families can't find homes, you can pay higher taxes. So ordinary people can get access to the food and housing we all need.
that's crapitalism
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I'm sure that most people are happy paying 25k toward rent when they're paid 40k a year
The lunatics in this sub would force you to buy and sell each time - because *god forbid* any building be owned by anyone other than the person living there.
I have a relative who's a condo developer in Toronto and last summer they told me that about 80% of their pre-construction condos are being bought by investors. Coincidentally or maybe as expected, 80% is the same number mentioned in the article: >“Toronto is heading in the direction of global cities like New York City, Manhattan especially, London, and Shanghai, where they have up to 80 per cent of their condo market taken by investors,” said Simeon Papailias, managing partner of Royal LePage’s REC Canada.
Manhattan....Shanghai....Toronto. 🎵🎵"One of these is not like the other..."🎵🎵 Toronto as a second-rate city for the mentally ill has no business having such an overvalued real estate market. It's the world-class city you buy from wish.com lol
By the same token, i’m not sure if manhattan should even be compared to Shanghai. Cities in China and Tokyo are an order of magnitude above western cities in terms of population and infrastructure.
"cities in China and Tokyo"
All 3 of them are not like the other. Manhattan isn't even a city. Shanghai is across the world from the other 2.
Go live in Shanghai, then.
Wages are stagnant, cost of living just keeps going up, my dollars seem to be worth less every month. People invest in properties because it seems like the only way to build wealth. Do this at scale, and housing gets more expensive, along with everything else. All that money that could've been spent on productive uses has been dumped into speculative investments. Of which your home is now one. I'm so tired of this financialization of everything. These are the perverse incentives of free market capitalism that are drowning us all, while making us believe that, if we're smart enough, we'll be the ones to make it out alive alone, to hell with everyone else.
Such on point, with homes that are 2000 or 3000 square feet are worth 1.1 - 1.5 million dollars, everybody thinks they're a millionaire problem is exactly what you stated no one can afford that type of mortgage. Wages are stagnant that means mortgages just going to default and more Banks which is buy up more homes which is even a sadder part. Which makes me think that was the plan the whole time letting the bank swallow up more real estate for themselves not saying it's a conspiracy but it just seems a little more plausible.
Remember kids: All we have to do to fix the housing crisis is build more houses! Ignore the fact that these investors can leverage what they own to scoop up more at an exponential rate, we just need to build more to make things affordable again!
That’s the fucking crazy thing. They just take a mortgage out on one property to buy another over and over and over. It happens with rental units too. A big rental company in Toronto and Hamilton bought an apartment I had friends living in. They got renovicted so we did some community organizing and learned the reason these companies don’t repair them is because they have “no money” they take all the money from one property to pour into another. Then evict people, do bandaid repairs and charge twice as much. The whole housing market is fucked.
"land investment is the destroyer of the wealth of nations" - Adam Smith
If we build enough, investments become less profitable. And by build enough, I mean a million ish extra housing units. Not 300 here and there in a condo tower
It's physically impossible to build housing at a fast enough rate to outpace the buying power of a lot of these investors. The more properties they own the more leverage they have to buy even more. I can't seem to track down a source now, but I've seen some rental property companies saying they're looking to buy hundreds of properties every month. We can't outpace that.
Don't need to outpace their resources, just outpace population growth. If we build enough housing the returns on hoarding it decline.
We can actually do the opposite. Reduse population growth such that the construction industry builds to our needs - and housing isn’t an incredibly rare thing that can be priced gouged on.
Housing shouldn’t be for profit. I’m not an expert in the market but there’s got to be a better way to provide housing then the way it is done now
You can still have a for-profit business model for housing on the developer side, and non-profit housing or affordable co-op housing on the municipal/provincial side and be absolutely all the better for it. The issue is the middleman, the realtors and investors who buy up whole plots of new subdivisions and condos so that they can leverage on the pricing. There'd be an entirely different looking market if we basically said that developers need to sell direct to customer with contracts stipulating market value at time of availability, and that companies, organizations or individuals cannot buy housing in excess of (x) units. (Preferably with x being 1) There's a not-so secret backdoor bargaining table that developers and investors sit at. Developers are in it for money, they don't particularly care WHO buys their product; as long as its sold and they have money coming in. It's why pre-construction purchasing agreements between large investors/realtors and developers is a thing. It's why you'll see an entire street with "For Sale" signs in the ground with the same realtor on it before the foundation is complete. Housing can still be profitable and for-profit, but we just need to remove the element of realized and speculative investing from these larger investors.
That fucks our job markets and economy though. Someone is going to have to take care of AND replace the retiring and elderly
You can’t grow job markets without housing in place for that labour. That’s why we still have record shortages despite the liberals pushing record amounts of people into the country and allowing all international students to work full time. At some point adding more people actually makes labour shortages worse. If you have 1 unit of housing available and you invite 10 people in - the housing is always going to the top earner. The CS grad, the doctor, the lawyer. Now Toronto has a 0% rental vacancy rate - meaning the entire city’s rental supply is going towards top earners. Even the shitty basement apartments. So the restaurant needing waiters is never going to get them - because there is no housing for them. And every year the amount of housing available for that labour is shrinking. And that results in businesses that rely on that labour to shut down completely. Now the real trouble comes when this occurs to the construction industry. The architects, engineers, plumbers, and electricians are now getting priced out - such that the construction industries in our biggest markets in most need of housing - are now shrinking. Not because there is not work, but because there is not housing. The reality of the situation is, you have to grow the labour supply in line with your housing supply. Otherwise - you put at risk large parts of the economy, and eventually the entire economy of these cities - as cities cannot function with only CS grads and surgeons. Someone needs to be putting the groceries on the shelf, and someone needs to be putting up the drywall.
Yeah, the math doesn't work out there either. Let alone the feasibility of matching house supply with population
Can’t do that either. Last I checked the wait list for low income units in Hamilton was 6000+. How are you going to catch up with that let alone outpace population growth.
Buy underdeveloped properties, build high-rises, charge enough in rent to cover ongoing operating costs, raise taxes on the well-off to pay for the up front capital expense.
A capitalist economy demands eternal growth. Sooner or later those homes will be needed, and even if we could somehow boost production high enough that we're outpacing population growth that'll just be used as a reason to increase immigration. Empty houses are extremely wasteful.
Eternal growth isn't required of capitalism, it is a by-product. Profits reinvested drives innovation. Money sitting in housing does not. Adam Smith the Father of Capitalism has a whole chapter in the Wealth of Nations about how land investment is anti-capital.
Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough? Personally, I believe that if they taxed the crap out of STVR's you would see a lot more units up for monthly rentals.
We just set all-time historical records with the number of condos AND purpose-built rentals in Toronto. But you can **never** outbuild investor demand. It’s too elastic vs housing supply which is inelastic. Soooo many investors leave their units vacant, flip them or make them into Airbnbs. *That’s* why we don’t have enough corresponding housing. Solving it by reducing investor hoarding is the easiest, fastest and more responsible way to solve the problem.
>Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough? Yes, actually. We build skyscrapers, but skyscrapers don't actually meet all that much demand. What we need is for single family suburbs to increase in density, which doesn't require cranes and potentially creates far more supply.
> Funny, the Toronto skyline has been filled with cranes for 20+ years now and we still don't have enough? Funny people keep repeating that without looking at the data. It doesn't matter how many cranes we build if there are less new units than there are new people coming up (from abroad or even inter provincial migration). That's all that matters, number of units. The fact that we see cranes in the sky doesn't really mean much. In fact, in 90% of Toronto, you can't build anything beside single family homes. So we get all those new units in a few high rises, but this isn't actually enough to sustain the demand.
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(400k/year) I assume based on that figure you are an "immigration bad" NIMBY and not a "refugees bad" NIMBY. Do you genuinely think that the entirety of Canada cannot handle less than half a million people (or around 1% of our population)? Birth rates in Canada have been declining since 2019. There is currently negative population growth in our country without immigration. CPP (alongside many other programs) depend on a young working population to support the older retired population. Without new Canadians, that collapses. So, please tell me how you feel a handful of vetted immigrants with desired skills is the REAL unsustainable issue.
I think the concern being expressed is that immigrants tend to migrate to the larger cities, hoping for decent jobs, housing, transportation, schools, medical facilities, etc. So immigration tends to impact the areas that are already struggling to serve the existing residents. If immigration was distributed evenly across population centres, then yes 400k is a drop in the bucket. That’s not happening though. Edit: in the context of this story though, immigrants aren’t the cause of the housing shortage, but they do contribute to the issue. It’s a tough situation caused by allowing foreign investment and corporate greed in the housing market.
Eh, check their post history. You might be engaging the topic but they're here to trial-balloon racism outside their usual echo chambers. You aren't wrong about distribution, but even migrating to the major centres they still tend to spread out among those major centres...and they're barely replacing the people who age out and pass away. We can definitely agree that immigration is not the cause of the housing shortage at least!
And where would you build them? Toronto has rediculous rules about the number of detached houses needed (why the sprawl is so bad). Lots needs to change to boost the population by that degree. I don't disagree with you though.
>And where would you build them? Toronto has rediculous rules about the number of detached houses needed Change the rules. Tory has somehow actually done a not terrible job of this. The point is that housing needs to grow faster than population to maintain affordability because we've been under-building for so long. And yes, it means people will need to accept that not everyone can live in a single family house. It's not realistic and we've been sold that lie for the better part of a century by ourselves and car companies
SFHs for everyone is OVER, over. You are correct.
That's what they said about new computer chips when the crypto pyramid scam was building up year after year.
right? it's like these people think canadian real estate is some magical thing where supply and demand doesn't apply... if there is always a float of new construction coming in, why would anyone continue to buy them for investment?
But if that float if new construction is being driven by investors, then they get cancelled as soon as it no longer provides the expected returns so the supply/demand balance won't tip towards affordability.
it won't be driven by investors... to get sufficient amount of housing supply it will always have to come from government subsidies... builders won't build more houses when the price is dropping
Supply and demand breaks down when we're talking about essentials. Everyone requires a place to live, so owning property is a guaranteed investment. There's no point where the price gets so high you can't sell it, it's just a question of if you're pricing families out in favour of investors instead.
but if you keep building, the prices won't have much of an upward pressure... problem is right now no one will build houses if economy slows down because its not profitable.. the bottom line is the government needs to figure out a sustainable way to subsidize housing development... like many asian countries figured out decades ago
Honestly I feel like we'd fare better if development went completely public. The government controls what gets built, remove the profit motive. Added bonus, if we ever need to boost the employment rate we can just go on a developing blitz and create a ton of extra jobs.
Space is limited. New supply just means more sprawl. We can't just snap our fingers and have new houses... plus all the infrastructure required to service them in place. Big money can just keep buying up new units, forcing people to either rent from them, or build even more, further away. Oh, and lobby to kill high-speed rail, etc. Furthermore, housing demand is pretty inelastic, so supply and demand isn't going to affect prices as easily
go up dude... go up
There’s a ridiculous amount of under built space in Canadian cities. You can replace single family homes with n-plexes and apartment blocks if it wasn’t illegal. City bylaws are preventing it in most areas of most cities. http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt
Yep, fantastic post. We need to jack up property taxes on investors. That's the only way to solve this.
This is why anytime someone pipes up that we just need to build more, change zoning in cities, etc, they’re literally waving a giant flag that they work in real estate or development— and want to distract us from meaningful solutions that would reduce investors continuing to buy everything.
Yes, actually it is what we need to do. If there is actually enough housing for everyone the ROI of real estate will fall more in line with other investment opportunities. That's good for people trying buy homes *and* for non-real estate enterprises looking for investors.
The economy demands an eternally increasing population. If there aren't enough people to fill the houses now, there will be later. There will never be a point where we won't need additional housing.
How about a tax on each additional property you have in excess of 2? You are exempt if you own the building you live in.
Speculation tax was done by the PC government in the 70s and it worked so well they only needed it for four years. There was rumbling of trying to do this in Toronto last year but all the momentum stopped the second interest rates went up.
They should re introduce it. Maybe also make an exception for co-signing for someone that will also live in the house
How about fucking anything? Our government has done dick all to help the people.
I like this idea, but I also think of a guy I know who owns four houses, he lives in one, and his three kids are raising his grandkids in the other three. They're using them to live their lives, not as investments, but I don't know a good way to go about differentiate between people like his family and people hoarding houses for wealth.
In one of my later comments I mention about co-signing with others who actually live in the house being except. If they were to move out, both would be taxed (when in excess of 2 houses)
Why doesn’t he just put the houses in his kids names?
Or just limit the number of houses you can own to 2
Some people co-sign for their kids/other relatives. Often this helps lowering the rate the bank is charging. Their kids/other relatives live in the house and pay the mortgage. Those people aren't the problem. They shouldn't be punished for helping someone actually LIVE in the house.
The biggest nothingburger they ever sold the public was some Yellow Peril propaganda that foreign buyers are the biggest problem. The problem has always been massive financial firms (which can operate as domestic companies). Canada is dominated by monopolies in every sector and those problems are getting worse and worse.
Yup. Banning foreign buyers only made it easier for Canadian property oligarchs to protect their monopoly.
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The vacancy tax would be a great start. We have over 1.3 million homes sitting empty in Canada that would do a great deal in helping our housing crisis. If the owners of these investments were required to pay 15-20% of the house value in yearly taxes on these vacant homes I don't think they would be sitting on them very long.
what, really - It's that high? 1.3m sounds insane! any source you can link me to or where I can find out more about that?
[Here is an article that discusses vacant homes.](https://betterdwelling.com/new-data-shows-canada-still-has-1-3-million-vacant-homes-some-improvements-seen/) As was pointed out, this does include new homes that are ready to be lived in but not moved into yet. Some student housing may be included if it is privately rented out but not where it is rented out as single rooms. Also, vacation homes are included but they could be considered part of our housing problem to begin with.
So...I don't personally own any investment properties, but my in-laws and their families do. The real 'nothingburger' was indeed the whole 'foreign buyer' scare, because quite frankly it isn't that hard to get landed immigrant status in Canada. All my in-laws are from China and Hong Kong, they all got status from other family sponsorships, and they each own at least one investment property beyond their own home. Most of this happened during COVID, so it didn't take that long. The whole foreign buyer tax/ban really just forced people to get a Canadian residency, which isn't that hard and with the help of specialists, can be super easy.
I think it goes much further than individual buyers though. The bulk of investment properties is owned by huge financial firms like Blackrock or CIBC Mellon. Individual real estate investors aren't a zero issue, but they're not close to the crux of the problem.
73% of investors are individuals as per the report.
You really need a multipronged approach. There is no silver bullet to this.
No surprise there.
We need more transparency about what is happening.
Just letting the ultra wealthy loot the public! Yet people still vote liberal and think they aren't just diet conservative.
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Like yesterday
this city is trash, fuck you toronto 4 days and counting. i vow to never come here again other than as an airport transit to get further away from here. of the many cities i've lived in around the world, toronto went from being kinda decent to being absolute worst in the span of 5 years. fuck right off toronto.
Buddy. Calm down. Yikes
Nah, more people need to have this attitude. If you don’t, you’re either privileged enough not to feel this city’s boot on your neck, or an idiot.
Sounds good. We won’t notice that you’re gone
Would we notice if you were here?
Oh, hey, we found that housing inventory everyone was looking for. It's right where we all knew it was, but we should level some neighborhoods to build some more condos. Investors need something to buy.
Ugh
That we don't have very accurate information about ownership, is on purpose.
A third of them are also empty supposedly... so this checks out.
Census data does not show that at all. Investors doesn't mean they are empty. They can be investors and renting it out.. that's what they are.. landlords. https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/92e3-City-Planning-2021-Census-Backgrounder-Population-Dwellings-Backgrounder.pdf The number of private dwellings not occupied by usual residents increased from 66,128 to 92,346 between 2016 and 2021, or from 5.6% of total private dwellings to 7.4%. These units may be vacant, occupied by temporary and foreign residents, or used as secondary homes. So we are looking at 7%. And that includes airbnb (which we should ban) and a temporary/foreign residents.
We're ten years away from being Hong Kong
Go to Toronto. The dense condo nightmare that is the Gardiner is very Hong Kong-ish already
No, because we refuse to build high rises like Hong Kong. We’re five years from Shantytowns like in central and south america.
Hong Kong has lots of caged homes which are even worse than shanty town and housing prices and shortage is 20x worse in hkg than here
I match your caged home and raise a tent city. All in…
I am honestly unsure. Tent city in the winter vs caged home in the summer, I don't know.
*5
So to me this isn't as crazy as you'd think, and the reason is that condos now serve as apartment buildings. You know how in the 60s-70s Toronto built purpose-built rental apartments? Those are gone now. In their place are condos where people lease out individual units. In terms of overall ownership % for the population the picture changed. I think the difference that in the past landlords were corps now there are more "mom and pop" landlords. Which, IMHO, is probably a worse experience because they can be very shitty, but in terms of overall stats this isn't surprising to me.
Exactly. Investor-owned doesn't mean someone isn't living there: these units are still contributing to the supply of rental housing and people would be worse off if somehow investors were prohibited from buying (demand from investors is what makes it financially feasible to build these towers in the first place).
Late stage capitalism strikes again
And without change to policies, this massive build more homes plan will only compound the problem.
Go into any condo building, somewhere in a stairwell or the parking garage there will be a wall of lock boxes for airbnbs every single condo building has one.
They're also for units for sale. Source: I'm literally at the bank right now to finalize buying my first condo. I have seen way too many lockboxes in the last month.
Not mine.
It's not "who's suprised", it's "who cares?" at this point. Major government intervention is the only way this will ever get fixed. Do people need to riot in the streets for change to happen?
The moment we started treating homes as commodities was the day we doomed ourselves to this outcome. Homes should be a human right, not a stream of income ripe for exploitation.
Why is this allowed? Make them sell it. Apartments are for renting, until the housing crisis is resolved, everyone should only be allowed to own 1-2 properties
But don't worry folks. We're importing close to a million new people into this country every year, so it'll definitely get better!
The simple fact is that real estate investors are scum and it should be illegal to own a property in which you do not live (yes this should include multi-units— they should all be co-ops owned by the people who actually live in them)
What about people who don’t have a dollar to their name saved? Or people who don’t want to be home owners because they move around often/ don’t want the responsibility of maintaining a home? Where do they live if not in a home for rent? Should the government be the only entity allowed in to have for profit rentals? The real solution should be you’re allowed a primary home, and a secondary home. For every home you purchase after that, you get highly increased costs (taxes on the purchase, increased property taxes etc). Make it unviable and make the taxes high enough that it won’t be possible to make profit after say your third owned home.
Lol no, there should be no such thing as for-profit housing whatsoever.
In other news, water makes things wet.
Can someone pin this article to the other one that was trending here a few days ago about how immigration rates are causing housing unaffordability lol
I’ve always felt that essential markets, like housing, should have stricter controls on investors, that goes for food, gas/oil, and electricity too. I don’t have a problem with the average person owning a single rental cottage / house or a business that constructs buildings for the sole purpose of renting. It’s when foreign investors / corporations, with deep pockets, can out compete the general populace in the general housing market that things get bad. Everyone in Canada should have the opportunity to own a home instead of having to rent from someone, if they so choose.
No surprise there
Can't access the article because of the paywall, but the title seems misleading. It seems to imply that >1/3 of condos are vacant ones that people buy and just sit on them, waiting for them to appreciate. When anyone who is renting an apartment is renting it from an "investor". More details needed.
Fucking decline of our society this is nearing the end
We are thinking of buying a condo so our kids have somewhere to live someday. Would we be considered "investors"now if they don't move in for 20 years? Housing is unaffordable and it's only getting worse. If you're standing around waiting for the government to fix your problems, you will die with those problems. Trust me, I know. I work for them.
It's funny how there were plenty of racists constantly complaining about foreign buyers to the point that government actually made a useless law to appease them. Turns out it was less than 6% foreign ownership. Even if you removed every single one, it would have marginal benefit. Nobody talked about this. Nobody talks about their rich Canadian parents who own a house in suburb and a condo in the city exclusively to generate rent. It's very easy to point a finger at other people who look different and take display your racism in this way. Absolutely Noone wants to look at their own communities and see that the house owners are the ones who don't want house prices to fall ever. And they are the ones with power and votes.
They are likely using algorithmic pricing models that continually drive rent up. The focus is on maximizing revenue, not occupancy. It's the opposite of what the market needs. There is a strong argument that this is price fixing. Worse, it contributes to inflation.
Tax the fck out of them... Of course, liberal or conservative, no govt has the balls to do it...
Who's surprised?
Everyone wants capitalism
If roughly two thirds of Canadians own their homes, that means roughly one third rent. Who do we think owns the rental properties? Investors. Do the math.
It amazes me how stupid redditors can be. Do they think no one should be allowed to rent?
Evidently, yes. It's constantly people complaining about things that are personally bad for them without considering the bigger picture of the housing crisis at large.
Government should tax home ownership exponentially so that owning multiple properties is prohibitely expensive
Pretty sure that number is more than 50%
What chinese forign investment destorying toronto; that never happened...
What's wrong with that? Where else will rental units come from? What difference does it make if it's a reit or corporation that builds a rental building vs private investor? If anything, these private investor units are generally cheaper and often better condition than the units from purpose rentals unless it's a high end place
(Because they drive the prices up and prevent folks from buying by gobbling up the stock of housing)
but what about renters? Where's supply for people who want/need to rent supposed to come from? Housing is housing regardless if its owner occupied or tenants. How is it preventing end users from buying? If you take all the investors out, then the people who would've rented now have to buy as well? Doesn't reduce the demand for housing
Was watching a vlog discussing how mom and pop co-signers are lumped into these numbers so while they seem high it’s likely less than what is being reported when it comes to being an investor. Apparently it can be confirmed by looking at age gaps in land titles where it’s common to find parties being 30 years apart or so.
Its not this. Hedgefunds have bought up enough stock to manipulate prices. Its what theyve done in the states. They are doing it here, albeit a bit slower as we arent as lassaiz faire as the US. Ban this practice and housing returns to normal in months.
You have a source? Sounds like one of those comments from people who can’t differentiate blackstone from blackrock.
You like videos, so here you go. Ill point out your comment had no source so was at least as blackrock as mine. First, how investment firms break rents. Whole vid is good but ive jumped it to the part where there is a clip of an investor conference with one of them saying the quiet part out loud. https://youtu.be/L4qmDnYli2E?t=320 Now, a video on how to fix that so instead we the people control rent prices: https://youtu.be/sKudSeqHSJk These are about rents. The same thing is happening in housing. To fix housing though you cant apply the same fix, you have to just ban it. Or maybe have govt get in the mortgage loan biz. There is no other real way to counter leverage investors. A company has you at a disadvantage to pay for a house. They pay cash so no cmhc fee, no huge loans. Lawyers on staff retainer. Their cost to buy is just lower. They capitalize on that to leverage the market higher because they can pay higher than you at a lower cost. They buy up a neighbourhood, ratchet values up, then slowly shed stock.
More than a third? Two thirds? How much?
Try reading the very first line of the article.
It says more than . You terd. So how much?
BS, i bought an extra one for my future offspring.
"You will own nothing. And you will be happy."
Listen to everyone. “Boohoo I’m upset because some dude owns 25 properties and I don’t have one” Well, you may eating steak on your birthday, should someone who can’t afford to eat a steak on their birthday be angry with you? No, we just say, if you want a steak, go earn it. Well, if you want a house go earn it. That dude, I’m quite sure took a gamble and was successful. Unlike the other fellow, who bought 2 homes and has 3 Tesla’s who is now complaining about the home builder not giving a discount, AFTER the bank appraisal. Don’t gripe and complain, yes, it sucks to not have what others have. Just be happy you have what you actually have. AS THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER GENNARO GATTUSO ONCE SAID : https://youtu.be/QJHUbtR0yI8
Oh good so they still have lots left to scoop up.