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Comment by digianarchist | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I bought a townhouse in Durham (East GTA) in December 2019 for $550,000.

I’m moving to California later this year and decided to sell. Similar properties are going for $1.2 million. Buyers are waving all conditions. My realtor tells me most places have 20+ blind bids and he hasn’t had a buyer add an inspection condition since the pandemic.

If you look at the sales data it makes no sense whatsoever. Sales prices are all over the place. Huge swings of hundreds of thousands of dollars for similar properties.

I’m making more money sitting in this house than I do at my well paid tech job.

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> I’m making more money sitting in this house than I do at my well paid tech job.

This echoes what I’ve been told. Founders at a startup I spoke to were from Switzerland and Canada. Tried raising capital in Toronto (where Canadian finance is happening) and Vancouver and the response they got was lackluster.

Investors basically wanted to match the returns they would get simply by parking their money in real estate, as well as the (non-existent) risk profile. This was especially true in Vancouver where they actually had someone rescheduling at the last minute because he was involved in a bidding war for some property in partnership with a foreign buyer.

So they ended up coming down to the Bay to get funding. I assume most of the owners are here in America now (they are still quite early stage, at least, the cofounders are and so are most employees).

Well, don't discount the fact that Canadian investors are strongly against any sort of tech investment and prefer natural resources or banking, which is the historical low-risk investments here.

Tech has always been a uphill battle in Canada.

Is anything being done to address this?

No, I think this is just the nature of Canadian investors - they are much more risk-adverse and don't seem to have the stomach for the "swing for the fences" angel investment that US investors have. It's cultural.

A relatively small number of multi-unit investors can impact the market when combined with fewer sellers (low supply). It drives the real buyers like a panicked herd into the limited supply.

Canada has a “100 million by 2100” goal with absolutely no policies on providing infrastructure to meet that goal.

Canada doesn't have such a plan. One "charity" group is trying to promote it.

Thank you for the correction. It's not official policy. Just an idea being pushed by a former PM.

How much of that is completely self-imposed with out of control immigration quotas and a lax policy around foreign money laundering?

I wonder which party is supporting these measures and why.

During COVID, which has been the period with the highest house growth across all markets, I understand there has been a negligible amount of immigration.

The foreign money laundering has been known for 20 years and none of the major political parties has done anything to slow it.

> I understand there has been a negligible amount of immigration.

What matters is foreign capital flow. Companies and “convenience passport” holders can still purchase on behalf of someone else.

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