Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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> They already taxed and stopped foreign buyers but the home prices in Vancouver keep going up as sales amongst local Canadians make up most of the volume.

These were always easy to work around: how many Chinese students come to Canada to study and just happen to have a few million dollars to spend on a house? The new proposal is also easy to work around, the Canadian government isn't serious about solving the speculation problem.

> In fact, without outside capital constantly coming in, the Vancouver real estate market is not sustainable. It literally is just another game of musical chairs, it is the news of some Chinese communist elite member buying a mansion in West Vancouver that gets local Canadians eager to own properties.

Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

> Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

I remember the 90s were depressing time for Vancouver. The economy was in complete slump and NDP took the fall for that.

Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles, people are in complete denial about that the Vancouver real estate market lags behind. Already the bubble has started to burst in Montreal, which I remember were the last to join the party!

> Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles

Chinese real estate prices are still pretty high. The government keeps things from bursting by controlling the real estate agents and their companies (owned mostly by red families, they just taper off on sales volume instead of letting prices fall). We will see how long they can keep juggling that. Which is why rich Chinese like to invest in western property markets in the first place: there is more liquidity in Vancouver and Toronto vs. Shanghai or Beijing.

BTW, I'm not from Vancouver, I just visited a lot in the 90s (when I was going to school in Seattle).

the Chinese communist party elites send money abroad is to put it out of reach. Very tough for the CCP to auction off your property in Canada or United States.

For the Japanese it was cheap debt that exported property inflation which led to an immediate drop in liquidity however currently there is cheap debt locally and its the locals participating in the real estate speculation.

the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver yet the media and establishment constantly loves to shift attention away from REIT and institutional money, rich Canadians and against scapegoat groups.

unlike the melting pot system you have in America, Canadians fall into ethnic tribalism, safety in similarity. There's an idea that everyone can be Canadian/American but its implicit understanding that it is false. Canadians have this sort of superiority complex and see themselves holier than thou, it is far more broken than America in some ways and just in my personal interactions, Americans by large, were far more "Canadian" than real Canadians.

The country honestly feels very much broken and the more dystopian and divided it becomes, the more it will push people on the fringes away to isolation. Ethnic enclaves aren't by choice, they are a byproduct of an unwelcoming and implicitly hostile incumbent establishment.

> the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver

It is probably much higher than that, 5% is just what ownership can clearly be traced to a non-resident foreign owner. But you have a lot of property owned by Chinese students. The government is really conservative when they measure these numbers. Heck, I think the empty Seattle townhome next to mine, which I know is owned by an old retired couple in Beijing (the daughter told us as much before she left), is not counted as foreign owned even though it for all practical purposes is (and was bought with money from China...but then again, I bought my townhome largely with money I earned in Beijing as well).

I'm sure plenty of resident Chinese and Indians own property in Vancouver also (since there are so many of them), but I wouldn't count those as foreign owners either. At that point, it is mostly Canadian money chasing after Canadian assets, rather than Chinese or Indian money. Here in Seattle, it is rich techies driving the market, and many of those just happen to be Chinese or Indian (citizens, permanent residents, and H1s). That is a different problem (rich techies like us bidding up the market, not that many techies are Chinese and Indian).

>Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

Is "fisherman" supposed to be a Canadian expression?

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