Foreign ownership may not be such a big deal: Report
Foreign property ownership has become a very important topic in the last couple of years. It has been claimed by some to be the major cause for Toronto and Vancouver’s dangerously overvalued housing markets.
However, a report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) shows that foreign ownership doesn’t have a very large share of the market at all. The fall 2015 Housing Market Insights report on Foreign Ownership reveals that while the share of foreign ownership is indeed highest in Toronto and Vancouver, the share itself is fairly small.
The highest concentration for foreign property investment is in the Toronto core where 10% of buildings completed since 2010 are owned by foreign citizens. When our lens is expanded to include the whole Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA) that share drops to 7%. Meanwhile less than 2% of buildings completed before 1990 have foreign owners.
In Vancouver foreign buyers have a similar share of pre-1990 property at less than 2%. Meanwhile they have a 6% share of properties built since 2010.
Most of the properties they own are condominiums in the highly sought after downtown cores of the cities. While they clearly aren’t responsible for a major share of housing activity, these foreign buyers may still have had something of an effect on the market as a whole, especially by driving sales of higher priced properties.
The government has heard the people’s concerns and have committed half a million dollars to better researching the subject along with the CMHC. The CMHC says that while they do the best they can for their reports there is no definitive tool to measure foreign investment. But from where we stand right now it looks like the main ones to blame for the crazy housing market is mostly just ourselves.