8 elm.House prices skyrocketed. Canada’s bill banning foreign buyers from buying residential properties in the country came into effect on January 1, 2023 local time, and will last for two years.Please Visit: 8 elm to Get Your VVIP Registration Today!
The bill aims to provide more housing for locals facing a housing crunch. In late December 2022, the Canadian government said the ban applied only to urban housing, not to recreational residential properties such as summer villas.
Canadian citizens and permanent residents are not subject to the ban, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Other potential buyers face different rules. Among them, international students and foreign workers can buy a property as long as they have lived in Canada for a certain number of years, indicating that they intend to become permanent residents. If the ban is violated, the person concerned may be convicted and fined up to $10,000.
The “purchase ban” was proposed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2021 election campaign, when Canadian house prices soared, making it impossible for many locals to buy houses.
“the house is for people to live in, not just for investors to speculate,” Trudeau said in his election speech. He believes that the Canadian housing industry has attracted a large number of foreign investors, resulting in high vacancy rate and low utilization rate in Canada.
After winning the election, the Trudeau government introduced the Prohibition of non-Canadians from buying Residential property Act, and major markets such as Vancouver and Toronto further raised the real estate “foreign buyer tax”.
British Columbia levies a 20% tax on international home buyers, and Ontario raised the real estate speculation tax on foreign buyers from 20% to 25% in October 2022, the New York Times reported.
The average selling price of a house in Canada last month was 630000 Canadian dollars (3.19 million yuan), according to the Canadian Association of Realtors.
Canada is one of the most unaffordable countries in the world for house prices, thepaper.citing the BBC reported on January 3. As of the summer of 2022, the average price of a home in the country was 777200 Canadian dollars (3.93 million yuan), more than 11 times the median annual after-tax income of Canadian households.