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Why limit these fees to foreigners? Why not penalize anyone who is leaving properties empty?
Vancouver, BC in Canada did the same, though they actually fully banned foreign property purchasing. I'm guessing it's low hanging fruit that won't get much pushback within the country. Hopefully these are just first steps, in both cases.
Really wish fucking anything were being done in the US.
Vancouver: https://vancouversun.com/business/real-estate/experts-say-foreign-buyer-ban-wont-bite-b-c-real-estate-prices
That was a temporary 2 year ban on foriegn buyers, but it was too little too late. They already injected too much money and equity in to the market. I'm sure there's a way around it too. Corporations can still buy property. And once the ban is lifted it's back to normal and the prices are still fucked even with the temporary ban.
Temp residents, including students, also aren't included in the temporary ban which makes it basically useless
Ah yes, the true cause of the preposterous housing market… college students.
My point was about foreign investors avoiding the ban through international students
Foreign students that pay atleast twice the tuition that local students do. And also roll up in luxury vehicles. You think those students don't also have big expensive houses?
https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/students-own-over-57m-worth-of-ritzy-vancouver-real-estate-say_n_12032930
They are either "students" or are being funded their parents. Either way they are complicit.
It kinda sounds like they are people living in their homes lol
I don’t see why I should care where they live so long as they’re actually living in the place. They obviously need a place to stay, shouldn’t be forced into renting, and I don’t know what would be accomplished by putting a cap on how nice of a place they can buy.
Edit:
$57M? So what, like 100 apartments, max?
Edit 2:
Oh okay so like 5 lol
So they will just create local shell companies. Didn't solve any problem.
Yeah they really need to fix that in the US.. there also needs to be a very significant reduction of property tax for individuals that are enterprising enough to rehab zombie properties. Go to like any city in the US, and you'll find so many homes that are sitting abandoned because the city has assessed them for such astronomical prices that no investor will touch them due to their condition.. The only option becomes to demolish them at taxpayer expense as they fall deeper and deeper into disrepair.
Last I saw half the elected lawmakers have investment properties.
They'll never make any laws that will impose additional requirements or possibly impact property prices negatively.
I can't read that whole article but yeah doesn't make sense.. a foreigner could just set up a trust which then purchases the property and leaves it vacant and you're back to square one.
You could become rich with that idea if it wasn't exactly what they started doing!
Because there’s a big difference between an empty apartment in a city and an empty half the year holiday home out in the bush used by the whole family.
And why not give Australians an advantage in our own country? I’m fine with American companies having to pay more taxes towards us.
If you can afford a holiday home, you have enough of an advantage already
Mate, I earn below median wage and I could buy a “holiday home”. This isn’t something fancy, it’s a shitty old house in the bush.
What I can’t afford is a house where jobs and people are, the city.
I think a lot of people hear holiday home and think like, tropical bungalow. A holiday home here in Sweden usually won't have a sewage connection, and oftentimes not even running water. You'd have to use a potty and bring potable water yourself. You could get these pretty cheap so long as you're in a position where you have some money left over after expenses.
A proper house will easily be 10x the amount a holiday home is.
There are fancier ones of course, that can basically double as a home. Anyone I know that has such a thing owns it as a family (as in grandparents, siblings, etc.).
I think people are picturing that, because that's what's been happening elsewhere; foreign investors using luxury real estate as an investment.
Well yes, not saying those aren’t a thing, but they’re not the only type of holiday homes. It’s not unfeasible for a normal person living above subsistence to be able to afford a holiday home.
Saying “oh you have a holiday home you’ve enough of an advantage” doesn’t really work in all cases.
A holiday home is a second home. If you don't have a home already and that's what you purchase, it's not your holiday home, it's your only home.
They mention "the city", I interpret it as the same situation as what used to be mine, owned my main residence in a city but not in THE city so prices are lower but most jobs are outside of the city I lived in, that allowed me to buy a second residence out in the woods for cheap, but I couldn't live there full time (no water in winter, floor isn't insulated).
If you don’t live there, it’s not your home.
You're almost there.
Just a little further.
You don’t get it mate.
It’s okay though.
Then where do you live?
In the house I rent?
So wouldn’t the fees be proportional to the price? The added taxes on a tiny cheap holiday home would be cheap too.
Price of my condo: 85k
Price of my cottage: 50k
Bought in 2013 and 2020 respectively, both for sale for months and I've spent about 10k in each in renovations. If you can't afford 135k in mortgage and 20k in renovations over 10 years then maybe it's ok to just keep renting... Even at the price the condo sold at this year (170k) that's 220k + 10k over 3 years for a home and a holiday home, perfectly reasonable for a couple.
Edit: Funny how people downvote when people tell them that, yeah, it's still possible to find affordable housing...
Where are you? The article is about Australia. In Sydney, you probably wouldn't have seen the prices you mention since at least the 1980s.
This Australian Property price update might be useful for information purposes. The median Sydney dwelling is AUD$1.1M or about USD$720,000. The median regional dwelling (ie outside of Sydney) is over AUD$700k, so about USD$460,000.
Yes, we are fucked.
Canada, our money has about the same value and median house value in Toronto (our most populous city) is CAD1.1M
656k median house price in Canada as a whole.
The condo I used to own is located about 20 minutes from the downtown area of the country's capital (Ottawa), the whole region has about 1.7m in population, the cottage is about an hour away from there.
What's funny is that when I was telling my younger colleagues to do like I did and use that as a stepping stone to eventually buy something better, the reaction was always the same, no purchase unless it's a single family house... And then they watched from their parents' place/apartment as the market went crazy and they could have made 50k over a couple of years by buying a cheap condo before the pandemic instead of insisting on starting with a house and if that hadn't happened they could have just paid their mortgage and used that as a savings account instead of paying rent...
The best way to give domestic workers an advantage would be to really raise property taxes, but make them subtractable as a tax credit. Credit.. not deductible, so overall tax burden on workers would be lower.
This would be an easy and logical step away from taxing labour and moving to taxation of land.
I'd suspect Chinese companies would be a bigger problem than the American ones but what do I know.
Because people in your nation are more human than those outside of it.
Or, it could be that there's like 300x more non-Aussies than Aussies so constraining the ability of foreigners to speculate on Australian real estate could be seen as a priority by an institution who's literal job it is to serve the Australian people, first and foremost.
So yes.
"It's better to be exploited by an Australian."
I would guess xenophobia