Vancouver’s West Side real estate being snapped up by overseas buyers: study

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – If you drive around Vancouver’s West Side, you can spot a lot of very expensive homes sitting empty, and a new study confirms many of them belong to overseas buyers.

As many as 70 per cent of single detached homes bought west of Alma over a six month period were purchased by mainland Chinese buyers according to a land title study undertaken by city planner and researcher Andy Yan.

“The interesting findings were that a significant portion of houses were being purchased by students or homemakers with no apparent sources of income in Canada,” says David Eby, the NDP MLA for Vancouver-Point Grey, who helped Yan with the title searches.

“It bears out a lot of the anecdotal information I’ve heard from people in the neighbourhood — houses that appear to be vacant, houses that were purchased and then demolished, rebuilt and then sat empty. It also underlines stories about ‘astronaut families’ where the mom and kids are here in Canada while dad is in China earning income,” he tells NEWS 1130. “There’s no apparent income for these buyers to purchase three or four million dollar homes.”

Eby asks if enough taxes are being leveraged from these homeowners to ensure they pay their fair share of the services they access, such as BC’s education system. “That’s a really important question to ask because when you look at another study and put it together with ours and some of the anecdotal information, it suggests that people are declaring much lower incomes in Canada than they are earning worldwide.”

There have also been concerns about the upward pressure overseas buyers have been putting on home prices in Metro Vancouver.

“The housing market in the Lower Mainland needs the government’s interest and involvement. Just leaving it to the free market hasn’t been a solution in terms of affordability for families. To make sure the system works the way it should we need this kind of research with the best minds out there to make sure there is a policy response,” says Eby.

Yan’s study looked only at single family detached homes on Vancouver’s West Side and Eby says there needs to be a comprehensive look at the data for all homes in the region.

“Realistically most people in Vancouver are not expecting to own detached home on the west side, but what is the impact of hundreds of millions of dollars coming into high end neighbourhoods? What is the impact on the rest of the housing market and how does that affect the condo market?” he asks.

“There’s a lot of speculation about company’s buying up multiple units in condo buildings in Vancouver, driving the prices up. Do we need to change the property transfer tax so corporations pay it like everybody else? These are all important questions.”

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