forma condos.Real estate sales in Canada have fallen sharply. Real estate sales in major Canadian cities, including Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, fell sharply in July, according to the Canadian Real Estate Industry Association.Please Visit: forma condos to Get Your VVIP Registration Today!
According to data released by the Toronto area Real Estate Board on Aug. 4, only 4912 real estate units changed hands in July, down 47% from 9339 in the same period last year and 24% from June.
The Real Estate Board and most brokers believe that the increase in Canada’s benchmark interest rate by 1 percentage point in mid-July has increased the cost of mortgages, reducing the number of people who buy homes on loans.
Sales in Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, fell 18 per cent in July, with sales of multi-bedroom suites down 38 per cent, according to data released later by the professional association of real estate agents in Quebec.
According to previous data from the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board, the number of home transfers in the area fell nearly 23% in July from the previous month, with 1887 units sold. Sales are down 43% compared with the same period last year.
In the Hamilton-Burlington area, close to Toronto, property sales fell 39.8 per cent in July from a year earlier. Only 393 properties were sold in Windsor in July, down 40 per cent from 666 in the same month in 2021.
Home sales fell for the second month in a row, falling 3% in July from a year earlier, according to data released by the Calgary real estate board. The reason for the smaller decline than in other cities is that buyers from big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver have bought properties here.
The reason why various restrictions on “foreign buyers” were first introduced and discussed in British Columbia and Ontario, where two Chinese metropolitan areas are located in Vancouver and Toronto, is because house prices in these two places have soared year after year, and the problem of “housing affordability” has become increasingly prominent. Some political parties, politicians and people in the industry tried to direct social grievances to “foreign buyers”, especially the more high-profile Chinese buyers at that time, so they rushed to introduce regulatory measures aimed at “foreign buyers” to please voters and win election benefits.
In the early federal parliamentary elections in 2021, the issue of “housing affordability” was expanded to be a key issue at the federal level and nationwide. Both the ruling Federal Liberal Party and the largest opposition party, the Federal Conservative Party, proposed that “once elected, they will introduce a ban on the purchase of houses by ‘non-resident foreign buyers’ in Canada”, while another main opposition party, the New Democratic Party of the Union, not only supports the “ban on home purchases by foreigners”. It even requires a “foreign buyer tax” with a household tax rate of up to 20% on “foreign buyers” at the federal level (along with similar taxes in some provinces), so it is not surprising that there is a “ban on foreigners buying houses” in the draft annual budget. Since the merger of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and the Union of Canada into the Federal Conservative Party in 2003, only five Canadian caucuses have been able to enter Parliament all the year round (the Federal Liberal Party, the Federal Conservative Party, the Federal New Democratic Party, the Quebec Group, which basically operates only in Quebec, and the influential but few seats of the Federal Green Party). Under the background that the top three political parties all support the “ban on foreigners buying houses”, this ban is bundled with the draft annual budget, which is a high probability event no matter which party forms a cabinet. The only difference is that there are differences in wording, killing scope and intensity. For example, if the party who came to power is the Federal Conservative Party, it will make more efforts to target Chinese buyers. If the Federal New Democratic Party comes to power, it is likely not only to abolish exemptions for foreign students, workers and “main residences”, but also to superimpose a “foreign buyer tax” like a gasoline “carbon tax”.
To put it simply, this “ban on foreigners buying houses” is in the context of the perennial surge in Canadian house prices, the prominent contradiction of “affordable housing”, and the perennial “demonization” of society and public opinion of the so-called “foreign buyers”. According to the election consensus of the major political parties, in 2021, the Federal Liberal Party will “launch this policy at the right time” as part of its campaign promise, and now it will be “timely fulfilled” to show its promise.
