menkes festival condo.Do you have to pay tax when you buy a house in Canada? Benchmark prices for detached houses in Vancouver have exceeded C $1.4 million, up 30 per cent from 2015. To this end, the Vancouver city government proposes to tax vacant houses to ease the upward pressure on house prices. The Canadian federal government also said it would work with local governments to study whether new measures are needed to stabilize the real estate market.Please Visit: menkes festival condo to Get Your VVIP Registration Today!
There are now 10800 residential units in Vancouver that have been vacant for more than 12 months, of which 9700 are apartments, accounting for 12.5 per cent of the total number of apartments in Vancouver, according to the Water and Power Bureau of the British Columbia government.
The government of British Columbia says it will clear the way for a vacancy tax in Vancouver, and the provincial legislature will hold an emergency summer meeting on July 25 to discuss the tax in Vancouver. If the bill is passed by the Legislative Council, Vancouver will become the first city in Canada to tax vacant houses.
Vancouver Mayor Robertson said that the vacancy tax is only for houses that are unoccupied throughout the year, and that the government will consult the public and experts to determine the tax rate, and that the new tax system is initially planned to come into effect next year. “the vacancy tax can encourage people to rent out vacant houses, hoping to solve the problem of unaffordable housing prices as soon as possible.”
However, the deputy director of the Institute of America and Oceania Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce and a researcher carefully expressed doubts about the Vancouver city government’s proposal.
He told the International Business Daily that first of all, in terms of feasibility, the Canadian government lacks sufficient effective monitoring of vacant houses, so it is difficult to determine which ones are vacant houses. If the data of daily electricity and water consumption are connected to the monitoring system, it may involve the violation of residents’ privacy. Therefore, the maneuverability of this kind of taxation is not strong. Secondly, from the perspective of purpose, the purpose of taxing vacant houses is to stabilize the rapid rise in house prices and increase the cost for buyers to hold houses, but if the housing market shows a rapid rise, the calming effect of taxation may not be obvious.
To sum up, Zhoumei believes that the publication of relevant information such as the proposal to levy taxes on vacant houses is mainly due to the Canadian government’s attitude of stabilizing housing prices, hoping to use public opinion to influence the behavior of investors. make them have scruples when buying real estate that is not used for daily living.
Even if the housing vacancy tax proposed by the Vancouver city government is implemented, experts point out that the implementation effect of the housing vacancy tax may not be as expected in the face of the economic downturn, low interest rates and low exchange rates.
The term “foreign home buyers” defined by the Canadian government refers to non-Canadian and non-Canadian permanent residents, including international students and foreign workers. There are reports that foreign buyers are directed at Chinese buyers. It was recently reported that Chinese investors spent C $1.3 billion on commercial real estate purchases in Canada in the first half of this year, an increase of C $1 billion over the whole of last year and accounting for 65 per cent of total foreign investment in commercial real estate in Canada. Europe and the United States accounted for 31.8% and 2.3% of investment, respectively.
Carefully pointed out that Chinese investors to buy real estate in Canada is mainly based on the judgment of the market trend, but also in the current global economy is facing greater recovery pressure, the depreciation of the Canadian dollar market behavior. If the housing vacancy tax is really implemented, it will undoubtedly increase the cost of housing ownership. In the case of strong market expectations of rising house prices, the relevant costs will be passed on to downstream buyers, which will not only have no obvious restraining effect on house prices, but may further push up house prices; while in the case of weak market expectations for house price appreciation, investors will turn to other countries to invest. At present, the United States is becoming more attractive to housing investors, so Canada’s policy of levying a vacancy tax on housing may reduce its attractiveness to foreign investors.
Data show that Canada has introduced a series of measures to restrict foreigners from buying houses in recent years, such as requiring real estate transfer documents to indicate the nationality of the buyer. In fact, the proportion of foreign buyers in Canada’s total home buyers is not high. British Columbia government statistics on the transfer of real estate nationality data in the province show that according to the data in June this year, only about 3% of the new homeowners in the province are from overseas.