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Comment by brandur | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how they picked the magic number of $10,000. (Edit: as mentioned below, the figure is actually 1% assessment.)

Vancouver real estate prices jumped 20% in 2015 -- a $200k gain on a $1M house. If pricing trends continue along that trajectory then Vancouver real estate still looks like a great investment even if you just eat the entire tax.

Still, I'm impressed by how quickly Vancouver is moving forward with these measures (going into effect Jan 1st!). They're sorely needed, and it's great that they don't have to sit in limbo for years before being enacted.

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>I wonder how they picked the magic number of $10,000.

As per the article: They didn't, it's 1% of the property value. The title is misleading.

Agreed, perhaps the title is misleading, but keep in mind a lot (if not most) houses in Vancouver are greater than 1 million.

Thanks, I missed that. It's strangely written because it re-iterates the $10,000 figure in the first paragraph of the article, but then notes 1% in the second.

> Vancouver real estate prices jumped 20% in 2015

> If pricing trends continue along that trajectory

It will not. That is a bubble.

Since they've gone ahead with the 15% foreign buyers tax, things have started to tank.

Volume has tanked. Prices are unclear. Everybody's waiting to see what happened.

My intuition, as well as pretty much everybody else's, is that prices will fall, when things start moving again. But it's far from certain yet, because that hasn't happened yet.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/the-market/vancou...

Price seems pretty clear to have tanked. Just look at the actual statistics package from the Vancouver real estate board[0]. The last page of that pdf shows a massive drop of about $300000 for the average price of a SFH.

[0]http://www.rebgv.org/sites/default/files/9.%20REBGV%20Stats%...

I have no idea how to read the tables in there, so maybe they cover this, but:

Too much information is lost, in the "average selling price" statistic that graph is using, to be able to use it to definitively claim anything like "an equivalent house is selling for less than it would have before".

For example, that graph could just as well be caused by fewer high-end houses being sold, but the houses that are being sold going for the same amount they would have before.

Again, I think it's very likely bordering on totally inevitable that prices will drop, and that that graph is probably showing that. But it's not enough information by itself to make that claim.

Agreed, but it's the same tables they're using to say the price is going up, with the same flaws.

For now. Once buyers gain confidence in the market again, it is likely to return to the way it was.

But you get rental income and don't get docked 10k if you just rent it out.

That's the goal with this tax.

The earlier tax by the province is to discourage investors.

It's 1 percent of the assessed home value, not a fixed fee. Bad headline...

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