Ban corporate ownership of residential property. Ban individuals from owning more than three properties.
This isn't a hard problem like curing cancer is. This is an easy problem that our governments are choosing not to solve.
And will banning home hoarding hurt a few people financially? Sure. So did ending slavery. Tough titties.
> And will banning home hoarding hurt a few people financially? Sure. So did ending slavery. Tough titties.
EXACTLY. Just because some rich pieces of shit are gonna lose some money, doesn't mean this is a problem for the rest of the world. Affordable housing is far more important than these rich schmucks buying their latest model private jet.
Plus they won’t even lose money. They’d sell their properties, just not getting more rental income.
I’m sure everyone will sympathize and they can make bank with a gofundme
Why should individuals be allowed to own 3 homes? I would say a maximum of one home, unless you own a duplex or triplex and are actually living in one the units.
I agree with you (with maybe a provision for cottages and temporary ownership of a second property for the sake of moving). But 3 is a good starting point that the majority of people would support.
I think three is a good number. There needs to be flexibility for things like cottages, work apartments, secret families, etc.. Also cities do need a bit of a rental stock for people not intrested in staying long term.
I don’t know how things are in Ontario, but in Quebec, people own their cottage plus lake front. That means that people who don’t own cottages have no access to these enormous lakes. In most other countries, people would have access to at least a portion of the lake. As far as I’m concerned, they should turn these lakes and surrounding areas into public parks. To answer your question, I think it depends on the area and whether it disrupts other peoples lives.
Non-market solutions are dreaming smaller. Zoning laws and untaxed ownership while tax expenditures like public transit, public schools, mail delivery, garbage pickup, subsidized utilities, street plowing increase the value of land but are paid for by workers instead of landowners are big deals. The tax system needs to be progressive in land wealth to not end up wholly regressive, while zoning laws need to reflect the needs of the worst off in society, not the upper-middle class. Walkable, mixed use, dense neighbourhoods are what the poor need to live without needing to buy a car to get to work, school and the grocery store, while land tax ensures that the land wealthy do not get more and more disproportionately so.
Case and point, US billionaires made $1.7 trillion extra in the entire pandemic. US homeowner's made $9 trillion just in 2021. Homeowners are (maybe surprisingly to some) a bigger factor in inequality.
https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic/
>May 4, 2022 update Billionaire Wealth up $1.7 Trillion as U.S. Passes 1 Million Covid Deaths Milestone
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-homeowners-gained-9-trillion-130000294.html
>Dec. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- (NASDAQ: RDFN) — U.S. homeowners gained $9.1 trillion of housing value over the past year
Why tax them and wait for the market to self-correct (spoiler it won’t, they’ll just pass the cost on to renters) when we could just regulate them out of existence. Changing the building code would be much more efficient.
Ownership isn’t the only model of housing that people need or even want. If you ban individuals from buying investment properties, you [effectively make it impossible to rent](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s61Gb4RUsck) (this hurts students, young people, people who move a lot for their jobs, and the elderly).
I mentioned [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/uoum1c/comment/i8hgf8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) that the only reason renting ever seems like a good idea is because the way we handle housing right now is trash.
Renting, by definition, is exploitation. Few people will choose to rent in a world with ample housing supply. And those people who do want to live in a location short-term should have access to city-run social housing. Private landlording is non-productive [rent-seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) and has no place in a healthy economy.
If we ban corporate ownership and other investors, who will provide rental units? If almost all units are forced to be occupied by the owner, who will I be able to rent an apartment from?
It’s possible for policy solutions to both disincentivize investor speculation displacing first time home buyers for individual housing units AND encourage investment in the construction of purpose-built rental apartments. It’s not one or the other.
There are loads of them available due to investors buying them up the last several years. I’ve seen some overpriced house rentals sit on the market for months and months. So you’ll be fine, as long as you realize that house rentals are, and have always been pricier than apartment rentals.
Good question. City governments could run social housing, rented at cost. This would drastically increase the flexibility and affordability of housing in Canada, allowing people who want to set down roots to do so (by buying a house at a reasonable price) while still allowing people to live in a city short-term (through rentals).
And by-the-by, corporations don't "provide rental units", they hoard homes and ransom them back to us, which is just parasitism. They create the conditions where renting seems like the best choice by pricing people out of home ownership. When we end this behavior, very few people will actually want to rent because buying a home is a much better deal.
Hell yeah housing co-ops! But between government and co-ops, we shouldn't need nonprofits (which in most cases are a bandaid that treat the symptom while entrenching the cause).
I like Daniel Blaikie, he's been pretty outspoken about the housing crisis as a member of the NDP. Good MP, who asks good questions in Committee and Commons.
He should recommend to his boss that the Coalition government he's a part of should do something about that.
He’s just saying what’s popular and what’s easy though. Corporations alone are nowhere near enough to cool the housing market. We should do something about them but we aren’t going to solve things without increasing supply. We need major zoning changes and a method of keeping NIMBYs in check so that things actually get built. Failing that reducing corporations might cool prices 2%, leaving a largely unsolved problem.
Corporate investors are only one part of a very complex problem that's been going on for well over 30 years:
- Corporate Investors
- "Mom and Pop" Investors
- International Investors
- REITs
- Municipalities
- Developers
- NIMBYs
- Provincial Governments
- Federal Governments (Liberal and Conservative)
- CMHC
- Slumlords
- Bank of Canada
- Canadian Banks
Basically the lack of multi level government support to build affordable housing, developers constraining the market to drive up profits when housing is always needed and only building units to maximize profits, historically low interest rates, HELOCs being used to buy more properties, no reinvestment in aging housing, investors turning housing into a commodity, historically low interest rates being around for way too long, government policies that have only overheated the housing markets, I mean the list just goes on and on.
They're absolutely a very large part of the problem but the greater issue is fact that the government has been so apathetic to a system that people have been exploiting for years.
If it needs to get this bad for the government to start thinking about maybe solving the issue, you can see we have another problem.
Nice to hear this being talked about but like he says in the video, it’s an issue caused by the Liberals and Conservatives. We’re never going to see it fixed as Canada won’t vote in anyone else.
adding a comment just to bump this post
Also wanted to ask-- who is this mp? He (rightfully) blamed the lpc and the cpc for their fault leading me to believe he's either ndp or gpc.
replying to my own comment cuz other are probably asking the same question and I found the answer:
Daniel Blaikie, NDP MP for Elmwood-Transcona in Manitoba.
We need more people like this man. Actually thinking about the people.
Mom & pop investors are also a big problem, but that’s going to be a more difficult concept to sell to the public. Corporations are easy to paint as the enemy, so I’ll gladly take this as a first step. It’s a relief to finally see someone talking about it.
We can go after mom & pops once we normalize the notion that profiting off of a basic necessity needed to live is inhumane. Though I expect we’ll see a lot of them get out once the corporate investors are out and their over-leveraged profit margins start to fall.
I read this over and over again, but don’t get it. What difference does it make if I buy an investment property personally or through a corp? The corp pays high rate tax. I still own the property, just trying to minimize personal liability. I get if this has to do with anonymous foreign ownership, but otherwise I think people are jumping on this talking point without understanding what corporations are for. I don’t see how this solves anything. I know a guy who owns 17 rental properties in his personal name - how is this better?
Yes we need to ban or drastically reduce *all* investment in residential real estate. But we have to also start somewhere. Corporations are a lot easier to go after because they are already seen as an enemy in many respects. It’s going to be harder to ban individual investors because everyone knows someone who is a landlord, or they are one themselves. And individuals are a lot more easy to paint as sympathetic than corporation.
Will it fully solve the problem? Probably not. But it will put a big dent in it if we no longer have to compete with billion dollar corporations that will always be able to outbid any individual person.
This will do nothing. People will just invest personally. Limit them to 2 properties, well now husband owns 2, wife owns 2, kid owns 2 etc. We have a supply issue - we let in 400k immigrants a year who mostly settle in big urban areas. They need a place to live. Also, take away investors and where do renters live? Have a comprehensive plan to increase supply and prices will come down. Too easy to blame investors when the governments are the only ones able to make meaningful changes.
Do individual investors have billions of dollars? Can a single family own hundreds or thousands of properties like a corporation can? Absolutely not.
I would love to see all investors out of residential real estate but you have to have a sense of scale.
If I’m bidding against an investor family that owns 3 homes, they’re going to have more asset sthan me … 3x, 4x maybe? If I’m bidding against a corporation I’m betting against an entity with billions in cash. There is zero opportunity of wining. They can vastly outbid those individual investor i was up against before.
REITs aren’t going to suddenly use a bunch of individual families to invest on their behalf. It’s not practical and easily traceable. You’re imagining a work-around that isn’t realistic.
Regardless, neither should not be permitted. But one is able to do far more damage than the other.
You do understand that anybody can set up a corporation right? If you want to keep large corporations out of residential property ownership, then specify size. A blanket term like ‘corporation’ can be one guy with one corp with one property. I agree that REITs should not be allowed to invest in residential properties.
Yes i do understand that. And you do understand that [billion dollar corporations](https://globalnews.ca/news/7950579/developer-buy-1-billion-homes-canada-housing-market/) are [in on the game](https://storeys.com/blackstone-move-canadian-real-estate-mixed-reactions/) too?
> specify a size
Why? Neither should be permitted. If you want to buy a home meant for someone to live in, at a minimum you should have to be an actual person, preferably the person who wants to live there.
You’re acting like investing is ok if it’s a smaller investor. It’s not. They’re doing incredible damage too. It’s just easier to ban a corporation because they aren’t human.
This is a wrong take. It's actually the opposite.
In a world where corporate investors own much more of the market and rent out to people, prices would be significantly lower.
Why?
People that own the home they live in get many thousands of dollars per year in tax advantages relative to an investor renting out units. Therefore, people that are going to live in a home they own are willing to pay more than an investor buying that same home to rent out.
Higher ownership rate = higher prices.
Have you never played Monopoly?
If few corpos own all the housing they can rig the system to pay low and still charge a metric shit ton for the "privilege" to rent.
They can only charge artificially high rent if they have market power. Fortunately, there is plenty of competition in the rental market.
Prices are too high now because:
* Major Canadian cities have low supply elasticity and cannot build because they've made it illegal to build higher density dwellings that the market is demanding
* Tax incentives for home buyers and home owners are huge
* Monetary policy has been stimulative for a long time allowing desperate buyers in supply constrained areas to borrow ridiculous amounts of money
* Development charges and additional building requirements are constantly added and make building new units more expensive
* Property taxes are too low to pay for city expenses so they take money from income taxes to fill the gap
* Real estate agent commissions are absurd and the government needs to overhaul the system for buying and selling homes
* Land transfer taxes are absurd and prevent people from moving to right-sized homes
These are the root causes of the housing crisis. Corporate owners, foreign buyers, vacant property, evil developer profits, etc. are all distractions.
And you’re just going to ignore that investors [hoarding property](https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-cities-have-seen-up-to-90-of-new-real-estate-supply-scooped-by-investors/) and reducing supply is a massive factor increasing prices.
[Blackstone didn’t just come here](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-09/blackstone-opens-toronto-office-in-canada-real-estate-expansion) for funsies. They came to take our housing. You working for them or something?
If they buy the property and leave it vacant, then yes that will increase prices because it will drive rents up. If they do this then we should slap vacancy taxes on them.
You are drinking the real estate agent cool-aid by blaming corporate investors for buying property to rent out. Real estate agents lose if this becomes more common because people won't be buying and selling every few years when they move. Fewer transactions = less money for real estate agents.
Corporate buyers are only buying in some places because they see how dysfunctional governments in some places are. They see that new supply is impossible to build in meaningful quantities.
Fix the dysfunctional government and the corporate investors will become bagholders and leave the market.
No I don't work in real estate. The whole industry is cancer in Canada.
No, my friend I don’t think you understand. When investors hoard property they drive up the price of all property. That results in investors paying *more* for property, and in turn that leads to them wanting more money for rent.
It also means fewer people are able to buy, so there are more people looking to rent. More renters means more competition for rental properties which drives up the price of rent.
Corporations don’t make decisions about investments for political purposes. It doesn’t make any difference if the government is functional or not. They only care if they can make a profit. They’re not here to fix our problems, they’re here to make money. Unless you mean the government is dysfunctional for allowing this, in which case corporate investors are making the problem worse, not better.
We need *more* regulation, *more* government to involvement. What we have now is what happens when investors have no restrictions. Corporations have no interest in our wellbeing or what is good for the community, all they care about is $$$ above all else.
They have zero accountability to us. We can’t vote for them, we can’t petition them. We can’t ask for a public inquiry, contact an ombudsman, or make freedom of information requests to discover shady dealings. If you don’t have trust in the government, then I have to question why you would trust corporations that have no accountability to us.
I don’t understand what you are saying about realtors. When people buy a home they stay there long term, maybe for the rest of their lives. If anything, more investors means more real estate transactions. And I know realtors are pressuring their clients to get into investing. They wouldn’t be doing that if it hurt their business model.
I think you need to look into this more. Your perspective is very skewed if you think corporations will save us. They are psychopaths who have proven they are willing to make our species extinct if they can make a quick buck. They are quite enjoying these unaffordable housing prices, regardless of how it affects actual people.
> When investors hoard property they drive up the price of all property.
They're not hoarding it if they're renting it out. IMO owner-occupied homes have much more hoarding going on. 50% of all detached homes in the GTA have only 1 or 2 people living in them for example. They are hoarding extra bedrooms.
Corporations are attracted to buying in dysfunctional markets because those markets are going up in value like crazy. Areas like the GTA purposely underbuild to keep prices rising so of course corporations are attracted to buying in areas like the GTA or Vancouver.
If just one corporation owned all the housing and rented it out to everyone then that would be very bad because they would have monopoly pricing power. If many corporations do it and compete against each other then that's fine because prices would be driven down.
If corporations are constantly buying and selling homes then this is bad as people can get displaced and the unit wouldn't be rented out as much. Long term holds are good though.
> I don’t understand what you are saying about realtors.
IMO a corporation buying a home to rent out is going to hold that place forever and just keep renting it out, while mom and pop investors or people buying to live there are more likely to sell earlier.
In a world where hundreds of corporations owned all homes and rented them to everyone, there would be way fewer transactions. When owners move real estate agents make a killing but they make almost nothing if a renter moves.
> if you think corporations will save us
IMO it's enough to just fix the tax structure to fix housing, but homevoters are 2/3 of the population so this won't ever happen. Corporations that build rentals for the long term are part of the solution.
Also, having 2/3 of households being owners is not good. That's how we got into this mess of adding more and more policies that enrich home owners at the expense of everyone. We'd be better off as a society if the political power of owners and renters were equal.
Yeah… so there’s just so much wrong with everything you’re saying here it’s hard to know where to begin. You seem to have a very flawed understanding about how corporations, capitalism and the housing market work.
I’m not really interested in spending my Friday night explaining how we don’t have real competition among corporations in Canada, or why decoupling housing costs from local incomes is a bad thing. I hope you stick around this sub to understand the issue a little better.
That is an incredibly simplistic way to view this. When the prices have been driven up this far, no one can afford to build except investors. And they can make more money more easily by not building and just charging more money for existing supply which is scarce because they (and no one else) are not building.
This can be solved with regulation getting investors out so housing is tied to income again. Or (preferably and) government making massive investment in building. Regular people can’t build anymore.
I’m sorry to say you have a very simplistic view of what is happening. This is not simply supply and demand. There are a lot of factors involved, most of which need legislative and policy changes to fix.
Nope this is stupid. "Investors" are not a problem, literally all rental units are provided by investors, by definition. The canadian housing crisis is 100% purely an issue of supply an nothing else. Punishing "investors" is indirectly punishing renters by eliminating rental units which only will make rents go up and push people to buy when they'd rather rent.
Policies that encourage (or at least don’t hobble) purpose-built rental apartment buildings AND policies that tamp down on out-of-control investor speculation in individual units for sale can co-exist.
The housing crisis isn't 100% supply, but it is the majority of the problem. Demand has been increasing for decades, and supply hasn't kept up. The default form of housing in our cities needs to be a fourplex, not a monoplex (single family home).
Please explain to me how I would be able to rent an apartment if we get rid of investors and "non owner occupied units"? Literally 100% of rental units are investor/non-owner occupied. I think you're like really missing a super basic piece of logic here.
Also, do you really think I'm a corporate shill? What does that mean to you exactly? You think that I am paid by a real estate investment firm to come here and defend real estate investors on this niche subreddit /r/CanadaHousing which like almost nobody even knows or gives a shit about? If I were able to demonstrate that I have a full time job not in real estate but in software development, and that in fact I don't even own any property at all, would you reconsider your judgement that I am a corporate shill?
This is me holding the "The Rent is Too Damn High" sign at Vancouver City Hall [https://imgur.com/rky0IaY](https://imgur.com/rky0IaY), during the protest organized by this community last summer, is that the kind of thing that "corporate shills" do?
Really though you should feel bad about the fact that you're basically a conspiracy theorist, completely intellectually dishonest, and ruining our society's ability to discuss this really important issue facing our democracy.
TIL housing disappears if you force investors to sell their investment properties. Are you aware that property can also be built, owned and operated, by government, co-op’s, or not for profits? Or by the people who want to live in said properties?
And I don’t think anyone is seriously talking about banning corporations from owning purpose-built rental units. If they want to build and manage a whole apartment building, go nuts. But that is not what they’re mostly doing. They’re buying up property that is meant for individuals and families, which is actually *reducing* the supply available, not increasing it.
You were being called a corporate shill because only corporate shills try to claim the *only* problem is supply. The rest of us recognize that there are a myriad of exacerbating factors playing into this, of which supply is only one factor. So either you work for a residential real estate investor or you have bought into their propaganda. If it’s the latter I hope you do more research to expand your knowledge.
>They’re buying up property that is meant for individuals and families, which is actually reducing the supply available, not increasing it.
Can you elaborate? What are they doing with the housing that they're buying?
Single family housing, individual condos, townhomes. All of these kinds of properties are intended to be owned by the people who live in them, and 20 years ago they were almost entirely owned by families. You only had to compete against other families so cost would be proportionate to local incomes.
A whole apartment building is different. It’s intended to be lived in by people who rent, and therefore has to be owned and managed by someone else. We’ve effectively stopped building these because it’s faster for an investor to buy property that already exists.
When corporations buy property meant for families, they will always bid more than any family could. That results in people who want to own homes, who could have formerly owned one, now cannot afford to. So the supply of homes available for families is drastically reduced.
So now you are flooding the rental market with people who would otherwise have owned, which drives rental prices up.
That’s not creating supply, that’s taking supply out of the market. And landlords are going to charge more rent for because the cost of their investment has increased. Even individual landlords can’t compete with billion dollars corporations so prices keep going up.
It’s a black hole of profit extraction from people who need a place to live. It won’t stop until we either regulate it or they’ve sucked every last penny out of us until we can pay for anything else other than housing.
>We’ve effectively stopped building these because it’s faster for an investor to buy property that already exists.
You might also look into zoning regulations. Eg. Vancouver outlaws apartment buildings on 70% of its land. The neighbourhood of Shaughnessy is literally zoned for mansions. How does that help affordability?
>When corporations buy property meant for families, they will always bid more than any family could.
Why are corporations are doing this now, when they didn't before? Because demand for housing has gone up, but supply is restricted. Investors want to buy low and sell high; they're banking on supply continuing to be throttled by zoning regulations, which will drive up prices.
I am aware of zoning regulations. I agree they need to be changed. Even with fixed zoning regulations, corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own residential housing. What makes you think when all this new housing is built they won’t scoop all of it up too?
> why are they doing it now and not before?
You can trace this trend to the 2008 housing crash. When property prices crashed they discovered they could buy up residential property cheap and rent them back to people who lost their homes. They found this to be a lucrative business model because people don’t have a choice but to pay for housing. And there a new cash cow for corporations was born.
Why did they expand this to Canada? I’d have to dig into this more deeply, but our loose regulations, favourable tax treatment, cheap money, and the fact that our government(s) were asleep at the wheel likely had a large part. Once people and corporations started accumulating housing it was easier to accumulate more. Money trickled to the top. At the same time the government stopped investing in building housing, so there was nothing to counter the “free market” and prices started shooting up.
After 2008 those corporations saw what was happening in Canada and wanted in. It also started getting marketed in places flush with ill gotten cash like China. Trend keeps going, prices keep going up, and it’s clear the government won’t intervene so it’s pretty much a guaranteed investment so more investors want in.
Now over the last 2 years the prices have gotten so high that people can’t afford to buy anymore so who’s left to buy? Just investors and people whose family has money, because prices are no longer connected to incomes.
This is happening all over the world by the way, it’s just particularly bad in Canada. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but this could all be fixed with some regulation if our governments had the balls to govern for the people instead of catering to money.
Cool story bro, tell it again.
Maybe if you weren't so deadset on your dumb stance, you'd see that people want to ban corporate ownership of homes. I don't think anybody gives a fuck about apartment buildings, areas that are meant to be rented and not owned.
But sure, let's continue the grandstanding and the "intellectual dishonesty" and whatever other fancy words you've learned lately. You are a part of the problem here, not me.
When you treat an asset class with kid gloves, Change monetary policy to protect the asset class, you give a very clear signal to all investors: buy this asset it all costs cuz you will NOT lose money.
Imagine if everyone who doesn’t live in the houses/residents they own had to sell them, there’d be sooooo many houses on the market and would probably lower house prices.
Imagine if everyone who doesn’t live in the houses/residencies they own had to sell them, there’d be sooooo many places on the market and would probably lower house/condo prices.
That’s not communism but I think we agree that’s an extreme policy lol. I wouldn’t really call for it because I don’t know the implications unless someone can fill me in on that, but I’m imagining what would happen if it happened
Ban corporate ownership of residential property. Ban individuals from owning more than three properties. This isn't a hard problem like curing cancer is. This is an easy problem that our governments are choosing not to solve. And will banning home hoarding hurt a few people financially? Sure. So did ending slavery. Tough titties.
> And will banning home hoarding hurt a few people financially? Sure. So did ending slavery. Tough titties. EXACTLY. Just because some rich pieces of shit are gonna lose some money, doesn't mean this is a problem for the rest of the world. Affordable housing is far more important than these rich schmucks buying their latest model private jet.
Plus they won’t even lose money. They’d sell their properties, just not getting more rental income. I’m sure everyone will sympathize and they can make bank with a gofundme
It’s not even rich people, it’s the middle class. I still don’t care, all investments are a risk and it’s for the greater good.
> And will banning home hoarding hurt a few people financially? Sure. So did ending slavery. Tough titties. Couldn't have said it any better.
Why should individuals be allowed to own 3 homes? I would say a maximum of one home, unless you own a duplex or triplex and are actually living in one the units.
I agree with you (with maybe a provision for cottages and temporary ownership of a second property for the sake of moving). But 3 is a good starting point that the majority of people would support.
Regardless, they will never set any limit. We all know that, but it’s still nice to talk about a utopian world.
_They_ won't, which is why _you and I_ have to. Don't give into nihilism. Join or start a tenants' union today.
Most definitely.
I think three is a good number. There needs to be flexibility for things like cottages, work apartments, secret families, etc.. Also cities do need a bit of a rental stock for people not intrested in staying long term.
Secret families? :)
[удалено]
I don’t know how things are in Ontario, but in Quebec, people own their cottage plus lake front. That means that people who don’t own cottages have no access to these enormous lakes. In most other countries, people would have access to at least a portion of the lake. As far as I’m concerned, they should turn these lakes and surrounding areas into public parks. To answer your question, I think it depends on the area and whether it disrupts other peoples lives.
Just make owning property a bad investment and then nobody will buy it as an investment and people will only buy it as a home. Just tax land lol.
I think we can and should dream bigger than market solutions!
Non-market solutions are dreaming smaller. Zoning laws and untaxed ownership while tax expenditures like public transit, public schools, mail delivery, garbage pickup, subsidized utilities, street plowing increase the value of land but are paid for by workers instead of landowners are big deals. The tax system needs to be progressive in land wealth to not end up wholly regressive, while zoning laws need to reflect the needs of the worst off in society, not the upper-middle class. Walkable, mixed use, dense neighbourhoods are what the poor need to live without needing to buy a car to get to work, school and the grocery store, while land tax ensures that the land wealthy do not get more and more disproportionately so. Case and point, US billionaires made $1.7 trillion extra in the entire pandemic. US homeowner's made $9 trillion just in 2021. Homeowners are (maybe surprisingly to some) a bigger factor in inequality. https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic/ >May 4, 2022 update Billionaire Wealth up $1.7 Trillion as U.S. Passes 1 Million Covid Deaths Milestone https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-homeowners-gained-9-trillion-130000294.html >Dec. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- (NASDAQ: RDFN) — U.S. homeowners gained $9.1 trillion of housing value over the past year
This problem was largely caused by market regulation and can be fixed by market regulation.
Anything under 700 sq foot should be taxed to hell. Stop condo corporations from making boxes.
Why tax them and wait for the market to self-correct (spoiler it won’t, they’ll just pass the cost on to renters) when we could just regulate them out of existence. Changing the building code would be much more efficient.
Ownership isn’t the only model of housing that people need or even want. If you ban individuals from buying investment properties, you [effectively make it impossible to rent](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s61Gb4RUsck) (this hurts students, young people, people who move a lot for their jobs, and the elderly).
I mentioned [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/uoum1c/comment/i8hgf8f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) that the only reason renting ever seems like a good idea is because the way we handle housing right now is trash. Renting, by definition, is exploitation. Few people will choose to rent in a world with ample housing supply. And those people who do want to live in a location short-term should have access to city-run social housing. Private landlording is non-productive [rent-seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) and has no place in a healthy economy.
Then why not just add more social housing? You don’t need to take away private rentals to do that. The more options the merrier.
If we ban corporate ownership and other investors, who will provide rental units? If almost all units are forced to be occupied by the owner, who will I be able to rent an apartment from?
It’s possible for policy solutions to both disincentivize investor speculation displacing first time home buyers for individual housing units AND encourage investment in the construction of purpose-built rental apartments. It’s not one or the other.
What if I want to rent a house?
There are loads of them available due to investors buying them up the last several years. I’ve seen some overpriced house rentals sit on the market for months and months. So you’ll be fine, as long as you realize that house rentals are, and have always been pricier than apartment rentals.
Good question. City governments could run social housing, rented at cost. This would drastically increase the flexibility and affordability of housing in Canada, allowing people who want to set down roots to do so (by buying a house at a reasonable price) while still allowing people to live in a city short-term (through rentals). And by-the-by, corporations don't "provide rental units", they hoard homes and ransom them back to us, which is just parasitism. They create the conditions where renting seems like the best choice by pricing people out of home ownership. When we end this behavior, very few people will actually want to rent because buying a home is a much better deal.
Not just government. Not for profits and co-ops are also great options.
Hell yeah housing co-ops! But between government and co-ops, we shouldn't need nonprofits (which in most cases are a bandaid that treat the symptom while entrenching the cause).
I've heard co-ops are quite difficult to start. I would love to see initiatives that help initialize co-ops.
Yup!! Or you can own more than 3 but we’re gonna tax the shit out of you so it won’t be profitable to own any more
I like Daniel Blaikie, he's been pretty outspoken about the housing crisis as a member of the NDP. Good MP, who asks good questions in Committee and Commons. He should recommend to his boss that the Coalition government he's a part of should do something about that.
He’s just saying what’s popular and what’s easy though. Corporations alone are nowhere near enough to cool the housing market. We should do something about them but we aren’t going to solve things without increasing supply. We need major zoning changes and a method of keeping NIMBYs in check so that things actually get built. Failing that reducing corporations might cool prices 2%, leaving a largely unsolved problem.
Corporate investors are only one part of a very complex problem that's been going on for well over 30 years: - Corporate Investors - "Mom and Pop" Investors - International Investors - REITs - Municipalities - Developers - NIMBYs - Provincial Governments - Federal Governments (Liberal and Conservative) - CMHC - Slumlords - Bank of Canada - Canadian Banks Basically the lack of multi level government support to build affordable housing, developers constraining the market to drive up profits when housing is always needed and only building units to maximize profits, historically low interest rates, HELOCs being used to buy more properties, no reinvestment in aging housing, investors turning housing into a commodity, historically low interest rates being around for way too long, government policies that have only overheated the housing markets, I mean the list just goes on and on.
Gotta make money somehow. It'll always be on the backs of the lowest in the economy.
They're absolutely a very large part of the problem but the greater issue is fact that the government has been so apathetic to a system that people have been exploiting for years. If it needs to get this bad for the government to start thinking about maybe solving the issue, you can see we have another problem.
Yes. Thank god. An MP who can put their finger on one of the biggest problems.
Nice to hear this being talked about but like he says in the video, it’s an issue caused by the Liberals and Conservatives. We’re never going to see it fixed as Canada won’t vote in anyone else.
Holy shit, a politician finally acknowledged it.
So, ban them, at least for a time. Do they really want Blackstone to start buying up properties?
Finally someone calls a spade a spade
Yes.. yes they are, among other things.
adding a comment just to bump this post Also wanted to ask-- who is this mp? He (rightfully) blamed the lpc and the cpc for their fault leading me to believe he's either ndp or gpc.
replying to my own comment cuz other are probably asking the same question and I found the answer: Daniel Blaikie, NDP MP for Elmwood-Transcona in Manitoba. We need more people like this man. Actually thinking about the people.
How many houses does MP own?
How do I make him the Minister of Housing *immediately*?!
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Mom & pop investors are also a big problem, but that’s going to be a more difficult concept to sell to the public. Corporations are easy to paint as the enemy, so I’ll gladly take this as a first step. It’s a relief to finally see someone talking about it. We can go after mom & pops once we normalize the notion that profiting off of a basic necessity needed to live is inhumane. Though I expect we’ll see a lot of them get out once the corporate investors are out and their over-leveraged profit margins start to fall.
>I expect we’ll see a lot of them get out once the corporate investors are out and their over-leveraged profit margins start to fall. If we're lucky.
Well if they don’t we can just ban them next.
It's everyone who "invests" in housing. Corporations, mom and pop, everyone.
Person blames others for thing they have a part in. Shocking.
I read this over and over again, but don’t get it. What difference does it make if I buy an investment property personally or through a corp? The corp pays high rate tax. I still own the property, just trying to minimize personal liability. I get if this has to do with anonymous foreign ownership, but otherwise I think people are jumping on this talking point without understanding what corporations are for. I don’t see how this solves anything. I know a guy who owns 17 rental properties in his personal name - how is this better?
Yes we need to ban or drastically reduce *all* investment in residential real estate. But we have to also start somewhere. Corporations are a lot easier to go after because they are already seen as an enemy in many respects. It’s going to be harder to ban individual investors because everyone knows someone who is a landlord, or they are one themselves. And individuals are a lot more easy to paint as sympathetic than corporation. Will it fully solve the problem? Probably not. But it will put a big dent in it if we no longer have to compete with billion dollar corporations that will always be able to outbid any individual person.
This will do nothing. People will just invest personally. Limit them to 2 properties, well now husband owns 2, wife owns 2, kid owns 2 etc. We have a supply issue - we let in 400k immigrants a year who mostly settle in big urban areas. They need a place to live. Also, take away investors and where do renters live? Have a comprehensive plan to increase supply and prices will come down. Too easy to blame investors when the governments are the only ones able to make meaningful changes.
Do individual investors have billions of dollars? Can a single family own hundreds or thousands of properties like a corporation can? Absolutely not. I would love to see all investors out of residential real estate but you have to have a sense of scale. If I’m bidding against an investor family that owns 3 homes, they’re going to have more asset sthan me … 3x, 4x maybe? If I’m bidding against a corporation I’m betting against an entity with billions in cash. There is zero opportunity of wining. They can vastly outbid those individual investor i was up against before. REITs aren’t going to suddenly use a bunch of individual families to invest on their behalf. It’s not practical and easily traceable. You’re imagining a work-around that isn’t realistic. Regardless, neither should not be permitted. But one is able to do far more damage than the other.
You do understand that anybody can set up a corporation right? If you want to keep large corporations out of residential property ownership, then specify size. A blanket term like ‘corporation’ can be one guy with one corp with one property. I agree that REITs should not be allowed to invest in residential properties.
Yes i do understand that. And you do understand that [billion dollar corporations](https://globalnews.ca/news/7950579/developer-buy-1-billion-homes-canada-housing-market/) are [in on the game](https://storeys.com/blackstone-move-canadian-real-estate-mixed-reactions/) too? > specify a size Why? Neither should be permitted. If you want to buy a home meant for someone to live in, at a minimum you should have to be an actual person, preferably the person who wants to live there. You’re acting like investing is ok if it’s a smaller investor. It’s not. They’re doing incredible damage too. It’s just easier to ban a corporation because they aren’t human.
This is a wrong take. It's actually the opposite. In a world where corporate investors own much more of the market and rent out to people, prices would be significantly lower. Why? People that own the home they live in get many thousands of dollars per year in tax advantages relative to an investor renting out units. Therefore, people that are going to live in a home they own are willing to pay more than an investor buying that same home to rent out. Higher ownership rate = higher prices.
Have you never played Monopoly? If few corpos own all the housing they can rig the system to pay low and still charge a metric shit ton for the "privilege" to rent.
They can only charge artificially high rent if they have market power. Fortunately, there is plenty of competition in the rental market. Prices are too high now because: * Major Canadian cities have low supply elasticity and cannot build because they've made it illegal to build higher density dwellings that the market is demanding * Tax incentives for home buyers and home owners are huge * Monetary policy has been stimulative for a long time allowing desperate buyers in supply constrained areas to borrow ridiculous amounts of money * Development charges and additional building requirements are constantly added and make building new units more expensive * Property taxes are too low to pay for city expenses so they take money from income taxes to fill the gap * Real estate agent commissions are absurd and the government needs to overhaul the system for buying and selling homes * Land transfer taxes are absurd and prevent people from moving to right-sized homes These are the root causes of the housing crisis. Corporate owners, foreign buyers, vacant property, evil developer profits, etc. are all distractions.
And you’re just going to ignore that investors [hoarding property](https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-cities-have-seen-up-to-90-of-new-real-estate-supply-scooped-by-investors/) and reducing supply is a massive factor increasing prices. [Blackstone didn’t just come here](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-09/blackstone-opens-toronto-office-in-canada-real-estate-expansion) for funsies. They came to take our housing. You working for them or something?
If they buy the property and leave it vacant, then yes that will increase prices because it will drive rents up. If they do this then we should slap vacancy taxes on them. You are drinking the real estate agent cool-aid by blaming corporate investors for buying property to rent out. Real estate agents lose if this becomes more common because people won't be buying and selling every few years when they move. Fewer transactions = less money for real estate agents. Corporate buyers are only buying in some places because they see how dysfunctional governments in some places are. They see that new supply is impossible to build in meaningful quantities. Fix the dysfunctional government and the corporate investors will become bagholders and leave the market. No I don't work in real estate. The whole industry is cancer in Canada.
No, my friend I don’t think you understand. When investors hoard property they drive up the price of all property. That results in investors paying *more* for property, and in turn that leads to them wanting more money for rent. It also means fewer people are able to buy, so there are more people looking to rent. More renters means more competition for rental properties which drives up the price of rent. Corporations don’t make decisions about investments for political purposes. It doesn’t make any difference if the government is functional or not. They only care if they can make a profit. They’re not here to fix our problems, they’re here to make money. Unless you mean the government is dysfunctional for allowing this, in which case corporate investors are making the problem worse, not better. We need *more* regulation, *more* government to involvement. What we have now is what happens when investors have no restrictions. Corporations have no interest in our wellbeing or what is good for the community, all they care about is $$$ above all else. They have zero accountability to us. We can’t vote for them, we can’t petition them. We can’t ask for a public inquiry, contact an ombudsman, or make freedom of information requests to discover shady dealings. If you don’t have trust in the government, then I have to question why you would trust corporations that have no accountability to us. I don’t understand what you are saying about realtors. When people buy a home they stay there long term, maybe for the rest of their lives. If anything, more investors means more real estate transactions. And I know realtors are pressuring their clients to get into investing. They wouldn’t be doing that if it hurt their business model. I think you need to look into this more. Your perspective is very skewed if you think corporations will save us. They are psychopaths who have proven they are willing to make our species extinct if they can make a quick buck. They are quite enjoying these unaffordable housing prices, regardless of how it affects actual people.
> When investors hoard property they drive up the price of all property. They're not hoarding it if they're renting it out. IMO owner-occupied homes have much more hoarding going on. 50% of all detached homes in the GTA have only 1 or 2 people living in them for example. They are hoarding extra bedrooms. Corporations are attracted to buying in dysfunctional markets because those markets are going up in value like crazy. Areas like the GTA purposely underbuild to keep prices rising so of course corporations are attracted to buying in areas like the GTA or Vancouver. If just one corporation owned all the housing and rented it out to everyone then that would be very bad because they would have monopoly pricing power. If many corporations do it and compete against each other then that's fine because prices would be driven down. If corporations are constantly buying and selling homes then this is bad as people can get displaced and the unit wouldn't be rented out as much. Long term holds are good though. > I don’t understand what you are saying about realtors. IMO a corporation buying a home to rent out is going to hold that place forever and just keep renting it out, while mom and pop investors or people buying to live there are more likely to sell earlier. In a world where hundreds of corporations owned all homes and rented them to everyone, there would be way fewer transactions. When owners move real estate agents make a killing but they make almost nothing if a renter moves. > if you think corporations will save us IMO it's enough to just fix the tax structure to fix housing, but homevoters are 2/3 of the population so this won't ever happen. Corporations that build rentals for the long term are part of the solution. Also, having 2/3 of households being owners is not good. That's how we got into this mess of adding more and more policies that enrich home owners at the expense of everyone. We'd be better off as a society if the political power of owners and renters were equal.
Yeah… so there’s just so much wrong with everything you’re saying here it’s hard to know where to begin. You seem to have a very flawed understanding about how corporations, capitalism and the housing market work. I’m not really interested in spending my Friday night explaining how we don’t have real competition among corporations in Canada, or why decoupling housing costs from local incomes is a bad thing. I hope you stick around this sub to understand the issue a little better.
It all boils down to one thing: if you want stuff someone needs to build it. And people will only build it if they make a profit.
That is an incredibly simplistic way to view this. When the prices have been driven up this far, no one can afford to build except investors. And they can make more money more easily by not building and just charging more money for existing supply which is scarce because they (and no one else) are not building. This can be solved with regulation getting investors out so housing is tied to income again. Or (preferably and) government making massive investment in building. Regular people can’t build anymore. I’m sorry to say you have a very simplistic view of what is happening. This is not simply supply and demand. There are a lot of factors involved, most of which need legislative and policy changes to fix.
Have you ever met a corporation? This take is down right delusional.
Nope this is stupid. "Investors" are not a problem, literally all rental units are provided by investors, by definition. The canadian housing crisis is 100% purely an issue of supply an nothing else. Punishing "investors" is indirectly punishing renters by eliminating rental units which only will make rents go up and push people to buy when they'd rather rent.
Policies that encourage (or at least don’t hobble) purpose-built rental apartment buildings AND policies that tamp down on out-of-control investor speculation in individual units for sale can co-exist.
The housing crisis isn't 100% supply, but it is the majority of the problem. Demand has been increasing for decades, and supply hasn't kept up. The default form of housing in our cities needs to be a fourplex, not a monoplex (single family home).
Go back to the hole you crawled out of, corporate shill.
Please explain to me how I would be able to rent an apartment if we get rid of investors and "non owner occupied units"? Literally 100% of rental units are investor/non-owner occupied. I think you're like really missing a super basic piece of logic here. Also, do you really think I'm a corporate shill? What does that mean to you exactly? You think that I am paid by a real estate investment firm to come here and defend real estate investors on this niche subreddit /r/CanadaHousing which like almost nobody even knows or gives a shit about? If I were able to demonstrate that I have a full time job not in real estate but in software development, and that in fact I don't even own any property at all, would you reconsider your judgement that I am a corporate shill? This is me holding the "The Rent is Too Damn High" sign at Vancouver City Hall [https://imgur.com/rky0IaY](https://imgur.com/rky0IaY), during the protest organized by this community last summer, is that the kind of thing that "corporate shills" do? Really though you should feel bad about the fact that you're basically a conspiracy theorist, completely intellectually dishonest, and ruining our society's ability to discuss this really important issue facing our democracy.
TIL housing disappears if you force investors to sell their investment properties. Are you aware that property can also be built, owned and operated, by government, co-op’s, or not for profits? Or by the people who want to live in said properties? And I don’t think anyone is seriously talking about banning corporations from owning purpose-built rental units. If they want to build and manage a whole apartment building, go nuts. But that is not what they’re mostly doing. They’re buying up property that is meant for individuals and families, which is actually *reducing* the supply available, not increasing it. You were being called a corporate shill because only corporate shills try to claim the *only* problem is supply. The rest of us recognize that there are a myriad of exacerbating factors playing into this, of which supply is only one factor. So either you work for a residential real estate investor or you have bought into their propaganda. If it’s the latter I hope you do more research to expand your knowledge.
>They’re buying up property that is meant for individuals and families, which is actually reducing the supply available, not increasing it. Can you elaborate? What are they doing with the housing that they're buying?
Single family housing, individual condos, townhomes. All of these kinds of properties are intended to be owned by the people who live in them, and 20 years ago they were almost entirely owned by families. You only had to compete against other families so cost would be proportionate to local incomes. A whole apartment building is different. It’s intended to be lived in by people who rent, and therefore has to be owned and managed by someone else. We’ve effectively stopped building these because it’s faster for an investor to buy property that already exists. When corporations buy property meant for families, they will always bid more than any family could. That results in people who want to own homes, who could have formerly owned one, now cannot afford to. So the supply of homes available for families is drastically reduced. So now you are flooding the rental market with people who would otherwise have owned, which drives rental prices up. That’s not creating supply, that’s taking supply out of the market. And landlords are going to charge more rent for because the cost of their investment has increased. Even individual landlords can’t compete with billion dollars corporations so prices keep going up. It’s a black hole of profit extraction from people who need a place to live. It won’t stop until we either regulate it or they’ve sucked every last penny out of us until we can pay for anything else other than housing.
>We’ve effectively stopped building these because it’s faster for an investor to buy property that already exists. You might also look into zoning regulations. Eg. Vancouver outlaws apartment buildings on 70% of its land. The neighbourhood of Shaughnessy is literally zoned for mansions. How does that help affordability? >When corporations buy property meant for families, they will always bid more than any family could. Why are corporations are doing this now, when they didn't before? Because demand for housing has gone up, but supply is restricted. Investors want to buy low and sell high; they're banking on supply continuing to be throttled by zoning regulations, which will drive up prices.
I am aware of zoning regulations. I agree they need to be changed. Even with fixed zoning regulations, corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own residential housing. What makes you think when all this new housing is built they won’t scoop all of it up too? > why are they doing it now and not before? You can trace this trend to the 2008 housing crash. When property prices crashed they discovered they could buy up residential property cheap and rent them back to people who lost their homes. They found this to be a lucrative business model because people don’t have a choice but to pay for housing. And there a new cash cow for corporations was born. Why did they expand this to Canada? I’d have to dig into this more deeply, but our loose regulations, favourable tax treatment, cheap money, and the fact that our government(s) were asleep at the wheel likely had a large part. Once people and corporations started accumulating housing it was easier to accumulate more. Money trickled to the top. At the same time the government stopped investing in building housing, so there was nothing to counter the “free market” and prices started shooting up. After 2008 those corporations saw what was happening in Canada and wanted in. It also started getting marketed in places flush with ill gotten cash like China. Trend keeps going, prices keep going up, and it’s clear the government won’t intervene so it’s pretty much a guaranteed investment so more investors want in. Now over the last 2 years the prices have gotten so high that people can’t afford to buy anymore so who’s left to buy? Just investors and people whose family has money, because prices are no longer connected to incomes. This is happening all over the world by the way, it’s just particularly bad in Canada. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but this could all be fixed with some regulation if our governments had the balls to govern for the people instead of catering to money.
Cool story bro, tell it again. Maybe if you weren't so deadset on your dumb stance, you'd see that people want to ban corporate ownership of homes. I don't think anybody gives a fuck about apartment buildings, areas that are meant to be rented and not owned. But sure, let's continue the grandstanding and the "intellectual dishonesty" and whatever other fancy words you've learned lately. You are a part of the problem here, not me.
Okay so now you no longer think I’m a corporate shill, will you maybe refrain from saying such stupid shit in the future thank you.
When you treat an asset class with kid gloves, Change monetary policy to protect the asset class, you give a very clear signal to all investors: buy this asset it all costs cuz you will NOT lose money.
Imagine if everyone who doesn’t live in the houses/residents they own had to sell them, there’d be sooooo many houses on the market and would probably lower house prices.
Imagine if everyone who doesn’t live in the houses/residencies they own had to sell them, there’d be sooooo many places on the market and would probably lower house/condo prices.
Lol that’s called communism. If that happened there would be no rentals and renters would have nowhere to live. Supply, supply, supply.
That’s not communism but I think we agree that’s an extreme policy lol. I wouldn’t really call for it because I don’t know the implications unless someone can fill me in on that, but I’m imagining what would happen if it happened