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Comment by Calamitous | Hacker News Reader

I’m more curious how it started.

I think it started with mostly foreigners buying up property, not to live in but as investment to keep the value of their money, like using housing as an alternate currency to dollars

I have been venturing to Vancover BC for the better part of the last 30 years. In that time, there were waves of hippies selling in Kits and moving to the Okanagan, etc. Prices went up. What has happened in the last 15+ years is a noticable vacancy when you look at housing as you walk around. An influx of foreing money has been buying up and keeping properties vacant. This is happening all up and down the west coast. Some of that money may not be foreign, but a lot is.

BC has attempted a lack of occupancy tax and it seems like it's not working.

But if we were able to build to keep up with demand, in theory the price would not increase so sharply...

AirBnB investors, flippers, and other speculative purchasers.

Mortgage rates of 1.x% probably didn't help.

Yearly 1% is very cheap, we have around 6% in Hungary :)

And that's at your lower bound.

Here's why:

Edit putting this here as intended

Viktor Orban's Bank" Financial Times feature of this morning. https://archive.ph/tINOK

This won't help "Hungary Loses the trust of its European neighbours"https://archive.ph/rXucw. Also FT earlier .

I contrast these articles because Orban ended foreign currency and foreign banks mortgage loan supply and nationalized the risks, now linking domestic mortgages to the political situation which is for everyone now a reckoning but any reckoning Orban isn't the best prepared for.

We are now up to ~4.5% for fixed interest mortgages and ~2.5% for variable rate mortgage. But in the depths of the pandemic, the rates went near 0.

Banking oligopoly is my guess. You see similar problems in Australia which has a similar banking setup. New Zealand I don't know how their banks work, but I do know they are up there in the clouds as well. Same deal?

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