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Foreigners Are Taking Over Real Estate in Australia and Canada; Influx of wealthy foreign buyers, particularly from China, buying up the housing stock
Topic Started: 1 Sep 2014, 11:43 AM (870 Views)
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Foreigners Are Taking Over Canadian Real Estate

08/28/2014

The housing market is so inflated that the international community warns of a bubble ready to burst and locals fret that soaring prices have pushed the dream of home ownership forever out of reach.

Some weary house hunters have turned wary as reports circulate about an influx of wealthy foreign buyers, particularly from China, buying up the housing stock.

This isn’t Vancouver. Or Toronto. Or anywhere in Canada.

This is the scene in Sydney and cities across Australia where, similar to Canada, low interest rates have sparked a years-long rush into the market amid cries of overvaluation and deteriorating affordability.

Outrage from a public keenly aware of the allure of Australia’s stable economy for their Pacific Rim neighbours spurred the government to clamp down on foreign investment in the real estate market. In 2010, the Australians reinstated an old policy that largely restricts foreigners to investing in new developments only.

Data suggests those rules have helped channel foreign investment into new, large-scale developments, increasing Australia’s overall housing supply and potentially easing upward pressure on prices of existing homes. Or at least that’s the hope.

Still, the spectre of foreign competition figures into the national conversation about home affordability, even as statistics from the Real Estate Institute of Australia suggest the proportion of foreign investment in Australia’s overall housing stock is relatively small.

That’s the key difference between the similar housing markets of Australia and Canada — statistics.

Canada doesn’t collect the kind of data on foreign investment kept by Australia, the U.S., and a host of countries around the world.

And so, nervous market observers are left speculating about whether unprecedented levels of investment — foreign and otherwise — are driving up home prices in major cities, or if foreign buyers are playing scapegoat for a hot real estate market driven by other factors.

In the absence of hard numbers, several Canadian studies have tried, with murky results, to quantify the impact of Chinese buyers on the housing market. The studies used methods ranging from a review of foreign-sounding last names to focusing on luxury home sales to a review of homes sold by a single agency.

“The fact of the matter is: We don’t directly measure it now, period. There are no direct measures of foreign investment in Canadian real estate,” said Vancouver urban planner Andy Yan.

“That is a pretty important piece of the puzzle that we need to understand when dealing with housing issues across the country.”

Vancouver’s rise to become the second most expensive housing market in the world — the average detached home is now worth $1 million — cannot be explained by local incomes, which are well below the average of major Canadian city centres.

The math simply doesn’t add up to explain what is happening in the market.

Just over half of Vancouverites believe there is too much foreign ownership of real estate in the city, according to a 2012 poll. But in a statistical vacuum, no one knows for sure.

Estimates for foreign-owned downtown condos in Vancouver and Toronto range from less than five per cent to a whopping 50 per cent.

There’s no question that home ownership in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver and London has become a trend among affluent Chinese, sparked partly by policies in China that make owning a second home an extremely costly endeavour and prevent them from transferring large sums of yuan out of the country directly.

A recent study by Chinese real estate website Juwai concluded that Canada is the third-most attractive market for Chinese investors, after the U.S. and Australia.

“Canadian cities are like London or New York, a safe place to invest for the long term. Some people call Vancouver a 'hedge city,’” said Andrew Taylor, co-CEO of Juwai.com. He added that the level of investment from China could soon rise, as the country is set to loosen rules on the transfer of wealth outside its borders.

“As Chinese buyers spread across the country, you could call Canada as a whole a ‘hedge country."

Chinese investors spent $22 billion on American real estate in 2013, and $17.2 billion on Australian real estate. The U.S. National Association of Realtors recently released a report saying, like in Australia, China is the biggest source of foreign investment.

Canada’s realtors “don’t have any method to capture foreign activity in the Canadian real estate markets with any kind of accuracy,” the Canadian Real Estate Association said.

Some analysts believe foreign investment is a cause for concern, while others say breaking that category out from the entire investment picture would be unnecessary and misguided. One thing is clear, however: Without any data on foreign investment, it’s hard to have an informed debate.

The first step toward any meaningful analysis, Vancouver’s Yan said, is to determine exactly what is meant by “foreign” investment and why it matters.

“Having global capital come into your real estate market can be a very good thing, but in another instance it can be a very bad thing. That’s why you have that kind of societal dialogue [to determine] at what point is it bad and what point is it good?”

On one hand, governments, realtors and developers welcome wealthy foreign investors, who provide a stable flow of money and competition that raises valuations. On the other hand, economists, city planners and community activists worry that such buyers are absentee owners with no roots in the community and so are most likely to pull out of the market quickly in the case of a downturn.

Critics are also troubled by the notion that foreign investors — by forcing up prices while acquiring property — prevent citizens from owning homes in a community where they could participate more broadly in the local economy.

Yan — whose great-grandfather arrived in the city about a century ago — is worried that empty condos bought by foreign investors and not rented out could create a “zombie city” with barren streets, disconnected neighbourhoods and resentful locals.

Politicians and others who have called for the tracking of foreign ownership data, along with researchers who compile makeshift data, have sparked criticism and accusations of xenophobia.

Such fear of foreigners is a dangerous side of an out-of-control housing market, warns Catherine Cashmore, a home buyers’ advocate in Melbourne.

At the peak of Australia’s crisis, the government went so far as to set up a hotline to stop foreigners from bidding on existing homes without official clearance. Resentful locals could call to report anyone they thought was a foreign national “bidding up” neighbourhood prices. The now-infamous program was sardonically dubbed 1-800-I-SAW-AN-ASIAN-AT-AN-AUCTION by one newspaper.

The hotline generated many calls but few results, as most of the “suspects” turned out to be Australian citizens and permanent residents, not foreign nationals, said Cashmore.

“You’ve got people who are always being outbid by someone else – it doesn’t matter if they’re from Florida or Lisbon or Japan or China – that naturally feels unfair,” she said.

The Australian example shows the complexities of determining what “foreign” really means.

Many Chinese-born buyers in Vancouver are likely immigrants who entered the country through a now-defunct government program that granted a visa to any migrant willing to front an $800,000 loan to the government. Others are buying homes for their children who emigrated for a Western education.

How do we distinguish those types of investors from speculators who leave units sitting empty? And should we? Are foreign buyers more of a problem than someone from Winnipeg who bought a residence and visits only during ski season?

In lieu of concrete information, Yan has tried to tackle the number of investor-owned condos in his city with imprecise, but creative, tools, including:

— Tabulating mailing addresses to which tax assessments are sent
— Studying homeowners’ grants
— Examining the level of hydro usage in various units.

His estimates suggest as much as 60 per cent of downtown Vancouver condos are not used by owners and 15 per cent are empty.

Another study by the Conference Board’s Robin Wiebe found a correlation between Chinese GDP and the average price of Vancouver homes, while there was no link between prices, and employment levels and interest rates, which are usually the prime indicators in local markets.
"The absence of this data makes us all get real creative,” said Wiebe. “All of us have to approach the thing from a different angle, not straight ahead like we should be able to."

In an attempt to “fill the data gap,” the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation has made its first attempt at collecting data on investment in the residential real estate market. The study found that 17 per cent of condos in Toronto and Vancouver are investor owned. However, it did more to highlight the challenges in gathering the information than it did to enlighten Canadians on the market.

The government agency’s study was limited to investors only from the same metropolitan area — largely owing to the cost of undertaking such a survey. The CMHC first talked to other bodies that might have data, or at least a methodology in place, but came up empty.

“Most of the people that we have talked to so far have been just stumped by the problem,” CHMC’s Bob Dugan said.

“By no means (is the study) the finish line. If we want to give a complete portrayal of what’s going on in the investor market, we have to keep trying to dig and find ways to cover these other groups of investors.”

Dugan believes it is important to get a handle on how many investors are in the Canadian real estate market – especially the speculative kind, where the practice of “flipping” houses can lead to price corrections.

While the federal government flounders for ways to study the impact of investment, Vancouver’s mayor Gregor Robertson has promised to create an agency to take a stab at tracking investor-owned homes.

Filling in those gaps is well within the federal government’s control and would help market observers discern whether the housing market is being driven by a classic imbalance of supply and demand or by something new, said Richard Wozny, a real estate economist with Site Economics in Vancouver.

While foreign investment is certainly part of the equation, he says, it is a less relevant metric than the number of overall investors in residential real estate, a relatively new phenomenon that has fundamentally altered dynamics of that market.

Traditionally, real estate investment was limited to the wealthiest class of owners in the commercial sector (those who could afford whole buildings or malls and office spaces); but small-time investors are now buying individual units, a recent phenomenon sparked in part by the allure of high returns and low interest rates.

“Every form of real estate has become a vehicle for investment, and that is unusual,” Wozny said.

“These forms of real estate have become a place to store wealth. It’s functioning like a currency, rather than have the money in the bank.”

He believes an effective and efficient solution lies in updating Canada’s tax policy to account for such 21st century investment trends by taxing residential investors more in line with the much higher levels paid by investors in commercial real estate. Still, he notes, in order to invoke that policy, the government first needs to act on calculating the number of investors.

Cashmore also believes changes to the tax system would be more effective than Australia’s current broken FIRB, which is facing allegations of shoddy oversight, loopholes and corruption.

Booms and busts in the housing market are actually fairly easy to predict and occur in 18-year cycles, but the level of foreign investment is making the current cycle incredibly volatile, Cashmore said.

Without intervention, she added, the unprecedented levels of foreign investment could exacerbate a crash.

She argues for a radical shift in housing policy that would see income taxes reduced and property taxes increased; it would balance out for homeowners and make speculative investment in real estate less attractive.

Although few global markets are as similar as Canada’s and Australia’s at the moment, both countries could look to the plethora of other jurisdictions for some balance between Canada’s lax foreign investment policies and Australia’s restrictive ones.

Countries including the U.S., Denmark, France, Mexico, Japan, Turkey and Singapore have not only implemented methods to collect data on foreign investments but have also invoked tax policies to curtail the trend.

Eyeing the potential for an investment bubble in London driven by foreign investors, the U.K is implementing a capital gains tax for foreign investors selling homes beginning next year.

Hong Kong’s government has levied a 15 per cent tax for non-residents who buy property — in part to curb fears their market will be overrun by mainland Chinese speculation. Denmark forbids foreign buyers from purchasing waterfront property and the U.S. places heavy taxes on the sale of foreign-owned houses.

Meanwhile, Canada’s hands-off approach — whether out of politeness, lack of know-how or self-interest — puts it in the minority among industrialized countries by remaining in the data dark.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/08/27/foreign-real-estate-ownership-canada_n_5718705.html
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jesusjones
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15% empty!! This will become the norm in the
Bigger cities.
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How about the FIRB actually doing their job and only allowing foreigners to purchase newly built property (i.e. previously wholly vacant and un-used piece of land) and including a tax to fund the surrounding infrastructure?

Would fix housing affordability pretty quick – take foreigners out of competition for established dwellings and greatly boost the supply of new dwellings, creating a few hundred thousand jobs in the meantime?

Its time to start a public campaign to name and shame the FIRB. I am sure we could get hold of data on property sales and prove with hard facts FIRB is not doing its job. I have actually seen the data. Maybe take a full page spread in a tabloid with the data, the name of the ministers responsible for upholding the law and the senior management of FIRB responsible for doing their job. Hold them truly and publicly accountable for it. Maybe gain some petition traction from all those priced out of the market because of the FIRB failure.
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Bardon
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Petition traction, that's a new one on me.
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Dr Watson
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1 Sep 2014, 09:30 PM
Maybe gain some petition traction from all those priced out of the market because of the FIRB failure.
The numbers are against you. It will be less stressful and more fruitful if you play the game.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt — Bertrand Russell
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Barista
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Can we get Peter Fraser along to whack on about how

- foreigners cannot by real estate without FIRB approval
- how they cant get approval for existing real estate
- how FIRB is acting in the national interest
- how international purchases dont affect the market
- how foreigners cant get mortgages from Australian financial institutions without FIRB approval
- how Austrac makes sure that all the money coming into Australia and going anywhere near real estate is monitored and scrutinized


Under the SIV visa what they do is effectively commit to investing 5 million in Australia and get the visa to do anything they like. What they effectively do though is invest their 5 million in a fund (the main banks will help them out) and the fund is structured to buy the home they want to live in (or the holiday house in Australia they want to have), or in some cases, so I am reliably informed, lend them back the money they ‘invest’ in Australia – making the SIV visa pretty cheap.
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Hitting foreign buyers with extra fees is an ineffectual solution to a mythical problem

Terry Ryder, 1 September 2014

It makes absolute sense that a parliamentary committee would propose hitting foreign investors with extra fees.

If politicians are silly enough to bring on a lengthy, costly, pointless inquiry into a mythical problem (housing affordability), it follows that they would come up with “solutions” that are equally ineffectual.

The idea which reportedly is being considered by the parliamentary committee investigating housing affordability is to charge foreign buyers of Australian property extra stamp duty or other additional fees.

The “logic” goes like this: there is an affordability crisis; foreign investors are causing it and therefore if we hit foreign buyers with lots of extra costs they’ll all go away and there won’t be a problem any more.

Housing will be affordable once again and young Australians will all live happily every after.

Here’s the problem with the solution: we don’t have an affordability crisis, foreign investors are not pricing young Australians out of the market and charging them additional stamp duty will not have the slightest impact on the cost of dwellings for first home buyers.

The Reserve Bank and many commentators from the property research sector have said they believe the impact of foreign buyers is being overstated. I think they’re right.

None of that should prevent the committee from proceeding with the idea of punishing foreign investors. This whole exercise, remember, is being run according to the 'Boys Own Manual of Bureaucratic Smokescreens' written by Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Foreigners account for a small percentage of residential property sales. Their numbers are dwarfed by local investors and in particular by the most powerful force in Australian real estate, home buyers other than first home buyers.

Foreigners are not out-bidding Australians at Sydney and Melbourne auctions because foreigners are restricted in what they are allowed to buy (although there are claims they are sidestepping the rules in the some cases). The “debate” has got to the point where anyone Asian-looking who buys at auction is deemed to be a foreign investor.

Most foreign buyers are purchasing off the plan apartments in locations such as inner city Melbourne and the Gold Coast. These places are not first homebuyer territory so they are not competing with young Aussie wannabes.

My interpretation is that the impact of foreign investors on Australian house prices is close to zero.

Here’s the great irony in all this: if you really wanted to bring down the price of city real estate, you should be providing incentives for foreigners to buy off the plan apartments, not disincentives.

The only way to reduce property values is to create a massive oversupply. Simply increasing supply a little won’t do it. You need a serious glut, with vacancies at 10% or 15%.

The only markets around Australia where values have dropped a lot (such as mining towns and resources regional centres) are locations with major vacancies caused by oversupply.

Several of the inner city markets in our biggest cities already have high vacancies but developers are bringing on more and more new towers. Why? Because they think they can flog them to foreign investors. At least half of the apartments being built around Australia are being developed by Asian companies.

These apartment towers are not being built for Aussie first home buyers or Aussie buyers of any genre. They’re being built for gullible Chinese investors. Some of our cities, headed by Melbourne, will end up with scary oversupplies, big enough to crash rentals and prices – and not just in the inner city areas.

If politicians scare off foreign investors by hitting them with onerous charges, many highrise developments will be scrapped. No oversupply, no collapsing property values, no cheap dwellings for first home buyers – and, incidentally, no construction boom and none of the jobs it would generate.

On that basis, I think deterring foreign investors is a good idea – not because it will help housing affordability but because it will prevent a disastrous oversupply of apartments in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, the Gold Coast and, eventually, Sydney.

Read more: http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/forward-planning/investment-strategy/politics-and-policy/35154-foreign-buyers-extra-fees-ineffectual-solution-mythical-problem.html
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How foreign buyers are cracking into the established property market

Cameron McEvoy, 2 September 2014

Residential property is virtually a national pastime for many Australians around the country.

In my native city of Sydney, residential property is arguably the number number one topic of conversation at BBQs, dinners out, family gatherings, and office water coolers.

So it is no surprise then that property conversations and public discourse over the past 12 months have focused on the topic of weakened housing affordability as a (possible) result of an increase in foreign investors in the market.

The challenge in discussing it properly, of course, is that up until recently whilst some initial figures have been published by the RBA and a couple of news outlets, there hadn’t been a thorough market analysis of affordability based on foreign influence.

However the federal government has listened to concerns and as a result it has commissioned an inquiry into foreign investment in Australian residential property.

Though the study is ongoing and results are yet to be released, the initial feedback was that foreign investment in Australian residential property has not been a major contributor to any ‘price bubbling’ occurring in capital city markets throughout the country.

Further perspectives outside the governmental inquiry however, have been coming to light in recent weeks and it has been interesting to hear the views put forward.

What is certain right now, however, is that residential property buying is strong in many major capital city markets around the country.

Influential factors such as limited land supply in high demand capital city suburbs (both inner, middle, and outer ring ones), current home owners blocking higher-density construction within city limits areas, and a low interest-rate environment are all stimulating a buying frenzy among locals and foreign investors alike.

These factors have collectively led to a major values growth ‘boom’ period in several markets.

The elephant in the room though is the notion of the foreign investor – in particular the Chinese investor – who are accounting for small but rapidly increasing percentages of all residential property buyers.

However, this is where the research may be coming up short. Like asking the question ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’, looking at sales data volumes over time may not account for the buyer's motivations for purchasing the properties they did; for the prices they did; during this time.

As a Sydney native who invests in this city (and is also currently looking for a home to purchase too), I’ve been privy to sentiments expressed “straight from the horses’ mouth” recently from both colleagues in the industry and other buyers ‘on the ground’.

When I am out at open home inspections most weekends, I’ve been speaking to other buyers with interest, hearing what the feedback is. It is certainly true that local buyers are ‘believe’ that foreign investors are having a significant impact, despite concrete official data confirming it.

So, the ‘real’ impact of more foreign buyers in the market could actually be a placebo-like effect. It is likely that the ‘scary thought’ of all the foreigners pushing locals out of the market is the actual catylst for locals pushing themselves out of the market! Or, the ‘FOMO’ (Fear of missing out) effect.

Regardless of your personal position or belief (however well or poorly researched it may be) on foreign investment jacking up prices for locals, the reality is that there are too many contributing factors to any property market’s growth (or indeed, lack of growth) at any one time to be sure.

One area where I do have a concern is in the ‘official’ data. One example here may be that foreign buyers (Significant Investor Visa or otherwise) are not permitted to purchase established dwellings – they are supposed to only be purchasing newly built stock.

However, most in the industry know that this is just not happening and is likely to go unchecked. Foreign buyers, especially from non-western cultures, are using one of the oldest group-buying strategies in the books, consortiums or shared-buying, to crack in to the established property market.

Buying through a consortium means that a distant family member or family friend who is an Australian citizen (and thus not counted as a foreign buyer) may aggregate funds from several other family/friends together who themselves are not Australian residents or citizens.

This enables for the purchase of established houses on land (often without the need for a mortgage as the funds collected between the group/consortium are usually enough to buy the house outright).

As someone who is looking for a house (not a unit), on a decent size block of land in Sydney, I can confirm that I’ve seen this in practice during inspections.

How do you I know? I’ve been engaging in conversations with would-be buyers at inspections who have told me they're using this strategy themselves.

Whilst I do not take personal issue with the notion of foreign investors buying established houses (provided that the scale/extent of this permitted does not substantially prevent local buyers from entering the market), I do take issue with the official inquiry overlooking these purchases.

Consortium-style buying is often unofficial and unstructured, making them very hard to trace and keep a paper trail on. The Australian culture of group-buying (when it actually does happen – which is highly infrequent) is all about drawing up official legal contracts, split loans, and so on (at the point of property purchase – which of course helps to keep more official records on the group buying going on).

Foreign group-buyers tend to have just one person or couple (who have either residency or citizenship status) gather all the funds separately and externally, who then brings these to the solicitor as one lump sum in cash at the point of purchase.

This makes the true nature of the transaction highly difficult to trace locally and will likely not be reflected in any official findings. That said, China’s government has recently put rules in place to make it harder for Chinese nationals to bring funds overseas for investment purposes.

It will be interesting to see the findings of the inquiry as these become available. What will be more interesting though, will be to see if any governmental action is taken thereafter.

Read more: http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/forward-planning/advice-and-hot-topics/35239-sept-3-observer-what-is-the-real-impact-of-foreign-buyers-in-the-australian-market.html
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Rhvic01
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I think in this case we are the most clever countries in the world who invite overseas migrants. They only select the richest rent seeker or the educated productive population to come to our country. This are people who live off their capital here. They just purchase everything in cash for their houses, cars etc. They say easy solution for this is to introduce land tax, ENFORCE FIRB rules and increase stamp/land tax for foreign owners. Houses prices aren't too high, wages are too low. :D
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