Canada extends its ban on foreigners buying homes for two more years
Canada extends its ban on foreigners buying homes for two more years
If you’re feeling fed up with the U.S. housing market, don’t bother looking north. Canada has extended a ban on noncitizens buying residential property for another two years. The restriction was first put in place at the beginning of 2023.
It’s part of the government’s response to an affordability crisis, but it’s not yet clear how much of an impact the ban is having on housing prices.
About a decade ago, a lot of foreign investors were buying up Canadian properties, according to Ren Thomas, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“A lot of Hollywood actors or directors or producers have houses or condos in Vancouver, for example,” she said.
The result? “Vancouver residents were being priced out of their own real estate market,” said David Wachsmuth at McGill University.
So in 2016, the provincial government put a hefty tax on those properties. It helped, for a bit.
But across Canada, housing has just become less affordable, so the federal government started the ban last year.
Housing prices have fallen, per Tom Davidoff at the University of British Columbia. “But they’re falling everywhere because of rising interest rates,” he said. “So very hard to attribute causality.”
These kinds of measures are politically popular, he added. But he points to another recent measure in Canada that could actually help fix the country’s housing problem. In order to get federal infrastructure money, municipal governments now have to make zoning changes that allow for denser housing.
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