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qhat posted:https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-house-flooding-damage westbank taking an active lead in helping canadians get more underwater mortgages
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Apr 17, 2021 05:27
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Hubbert posted:westbank taking an active lead in helping canadians get more underwater mortgages Perfect on every level.
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Apr 17, 2021 06:25
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Lol the government has to do something about condo insurance!!!!!!!
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Apr 17, 2021 06:53
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Hubbert posted:
You gotta hand it to Doug for without fail writing up an article every time something comes across his desk that allows him to push a vaguely xenophobic, anti-immigrant narrative. This last week we've seen Adam Vaughan putting on wild distraction play to change the channel and ensure that people don't actually try to blame the federal government for housing issues or look to the feds for solutions. Blaming foreign investors, in an environment where there's literally near 0 in BC, is his big move. Being a useful idiot, Doug somehow thinks that Vaughan is straight talking maverick and that Vaughan is not totally being a good lib soldier and making up a bunch of poo poo. quote:Liberal apparatchiks must be going squirrely after loquacious MP Adam Vaughan inadvertently outed what has been the party’s real scheme on housing for six years — pushing a policy that only worsens extreme unaffordability in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Oh see housing is expensive because of foreign investment! This is what grabbed Doug's attention. quote:Whatever is going on in Vaughn’s heart, the reality is the Liberals’ housing strategy is privileging foreign investors and directing billions to Canada’s politically powerful development lobby at the same time it’s drastically undermining local families who have been waiting for an opening into owning. [citation needed?] quote:Ron Butler, a prominent Canadian mortgage provider and real-estate analyst, says a few housing-policy observers have been complaining about this unspoken Liberal policy for years. Developers and their allies have often shut them down by labelling them xenophobic. First off lmao at how Doug feels the need to pump up Butler's creds by saying he's been "spoken highly of" because let's be honest, Butler is probably just some twitter dude that pumps bitcoin and real estate when he's not going off on a xenophobic tangent. But yes foreign money was pouring into BC... which is why the government brought in a foreign/spec tax which has brought foreign buying down to near zero. Do Doug and Butler feel that this is not the case? quote:But it seemed Vaughan, and by extension the minister responsible for housing, Jean-Yves Duclos, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself, are far more worried about not alienating those who already own homes. This is the key thing. If houses are to become "more affordable" they need to be cheaper to buy, which means they need to drop in price. Vaughan is saying here that the government will never let the "middle class" experience a drop in equity. Therefore the Liberal government will never do anything to make houses become cheaper. quote:When Vaughan admitted that Canada’s housing market is “driven by speculation” and that “it gets very tricky to curb speculation,” Pasalis said the housing secretary was ignoring what other countries have already done. Here Doug spins back into the argument he wants to write about. We need to do something about foreign investors! Poor Andy Yan gets dragged into this thing unquoted because of some research he did back in 2016, back when there was incredible amounts of foreign investment. I'd be real curious what Yan would have to say about whether there remains speculation of this sort in 2021. Of course he wasn't asked. quote:“I currently have four sets of buyers — three of them are highly paid professional couples and one is a local business owner, all with very good incomes — and these prices are even out of reach for them. Two of these have given up looking at all,” Hutchinson said. Here we're starting to get into paranoid make believe land. It's not just the foreigners, but also those "permanent residents" that are the problem. They're colluding with the foreigners! quote:It’s important to keep in mind SFU policy analyst Josh Gordon’s definition of foreign ownership, which is “housing purchased primarily with income or wealth earned abroad and not taxed as income in Canada.” Gordon’s recent peer-reviewed paper says lack of connection between soaring housing prices and tepid local wages in Metro Vancouver is caused in large part by hidden foreign ownership. I agree Canadians working for Apple in Cupertino, making a fortune with RSUs and coming back and buying nice kits houses are a big problem. Oh wait somehow I feel the concern is about another group of people bringing in wealth earned abroad. quote:The B.C. NDP have attempted to deal with foreign ownership by bringing in a non-resident buyers tax and the vacancy and speculation tax, which targets so-called ‘satellite” families in which the breadwinner earns most of their money outside Canada. They’re better than nothing, even with this current pandemic run-up in prices. Casually dismissing the current actions as ineffective even though the evidence shows that the foreign/spec tax has been super effective. quote:Many North Americans these days applaud New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for her leadership, including on housing. She banned foreign ownership in 2018. And, to reduce speculation, she has cut immigration and required new home buyers to have large down payments. Finally let's round things out with a the call to action doug really wanted to get to: lowering immigration!
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Apr 17, 2021 17:05
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Femtosecond posted:You gotta hand it to Doug for without fail writing up an article every time something comes across his desk that allows him to push a vaguely xenophobic, anti-immigrant narrative. How about this: immigration fueled by money not earned in the Canadian marketplace distorts housing prices. Therefore, immigration, amongst other factors, should be managed such that prices are mitigated and remain connected to cost of living for people who work for their living. When people like you dog whistle racism anytime this is brought up, you crush discourse for reasonable people who aren’t opposed to people, but to the distorting effects of a global economic system that fulminates rampant inequality. Our leaders have allowed, indeed encouraged this approach because our own productivity is a joke and if we weren’t importing foreign wealth and building a real estate economy, our standard of living would be far worse than it actually is.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:55
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:How about this: immigration fueled by money not earned in the Canadian marketplace distorts housing prices. Therefore, immigration, amongst other factors, should be managed such that prices are mitigated and remain connected to cost of living for people who work for their living. in fact, this was an incredible effective tactic right up until andy yan blew the topic right open with his data and vancouver's previous mayor called his academic findings racist edit: i mean, gently caress, it's been informally recognized that vancouver / lower mainland real estate is a more popular investment than gold for the global elite Hubbert fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 20:13
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qhat posted:https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-house-flooding-damage Really stepping it up on the whole leaky condo thing
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Apr 17, 2021 20:39
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:How about this: immigration fueled by money not earned in the Canadian marketplace distorts housing prices. Therefore, immigration, amongst other factors, should be managed such that prices are mitigated and remain connected to cost of living for people who work for their living. No doubt heaps of people have tried to disingenuously shout "thats racist" as an attempt to stifle and shut down any debate and fair questions about the nature of foreign capital investment in Vancouver. People have certainly said that to me, since I've always been critical of the distortionary impact of foreign capital since day one. But that was then and this is now. We've been having this debate for years and we know a lot more now than we did in 2015. In 2015 the province kept few if any records about the nature of home buying trends. That it seemed like certain types of people were buying in certain neighbourhoods was pure hearsay. Andy Yan blew the doors open on the discussion with his study that suggested that a very significant portion of home buyers in the west side of Vancouver were likely from mainland china. People called him racist for this. Fast forward to late 2016 and the government ended up actually finally starting to collect information about who was buying what. Turns out that in some select neighbourhoods there was actually a staggering amount of foreign buying going on. Suddenly we had a visible problem, and a foreign buyer tax was brought in, followed by a anti-vacancy + speculation tax by the next government. The result was that foreign investment plunged. We know this because we are now collecting the data. The big difference between the debate around foreign capital influence back in 2015 and now in 2021, is that anyone still musing about foreign capital being a problematic thing is straight up making poo poo up, and lying by omission in not noting the data we collect that 100% counters their assertion. Those pushing these foreign investment concerns need to be a lot more clear what the hell they're specifically talking about, and how specifically foreign investment is distorting the market. Todds article suggests that the same thing is going on now as 2016, where we knew that 18% of homes in Richmond being bought by foreigners. Last I read it was 1% across the region. Doesn't seem like the same thing to me! quote:Since March 2020, that monthly number of [foreign buyer] transactions has not surpassed 15 – and failed to break single digits for six of 2020’s last 10 months, when monthly sales averaged nearly 2,000 homes a month. None of the people quoted in Todds article have a leg to stand on. If Todd was interested at all in the truth, and wanted to do some real journalism he could have called the province and asked for some recent foreign investment numbers. He didn't. Instead he gathered some vague and baseless claims from the usual suspects on twitter. These people need to put up or shut up. If our data shows foreign buying is 1% and less, what is this phantom foreign investment distortion exactly and what is the mechanism here? At this point anyone still banging this foreign investment drum, with all the evidence to the contrary, I'm just gonna call a spade a spade, is being mislead by xenophobes, people who are leveraging this housing crisis issue to further their existing anti-immigration stances. Given the body of work of Doug Todd, finding every excuse to write about how immigration is bad, he's a xenophobe. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 22:19
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Foreign buyers sure as hell aren't moving the market today, but they still weren't moving the market when foreign ownership peaked at around 5% of Vancouver's housing market, either. It's people with household incomes under $80,000 buying homes that cost close to a million dollars, with money they want to believe they'll earn in the future (but won't). Canadians just want to be able to borrow too much to purchase assets that track inflation in the long term, pretend they'll go to the moon, and then blame someone else for their own stupidity.
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Apr 17, 2021 23:32
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Some definitions of foreign buyers include all buyers where income is primarily of foreign in origin, regardless of immigration status. I would say the majority of argument over foreign buyers impact on the market is actually around the semantics of the term, not the substance of the argument.
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Apr 17, 2021 23:43
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Hubbert posted:in fact, this was an incredible effective tactic right up until andy yan blew the topic right open with his data and vancouver's previous mayor called his academic findings racist quote:Yan found that buyers with “non-Anglicised Chinese names” had picked up two-thirds of 172 houses sold over a six-month period beginning in September 2014 in Vancouver’s posh west side neighbourhoods. Yeah, according to his study I would have been counted as a "foreign investor" or whatever. But I just wanted to keep my Chinese name, and so apparently the state of the Canadian housing market is the fault of people like me.
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Apr 17, 2021 23:45
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tagesschau posted:Foreign buyers sure as hell aren't moving the market today, but they still weren't moving the market when foreign ownership peaked at around 5% of Vancouver's housing market, either. It's people with household incomes under $80,000 buying homes that cost close to a million dollars, with money they want to believe they'll earn in the future (but won't). Great to see reactionary opinions imported from US discourse circa 2009 in here.
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Apr 18, 2021 01:05
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jettisonedstuff posted:Great to see reactionary opinions imported from US discourse circa 2009 in here. "It's different this time."
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Apr 18, 2021 01:31
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Yeah totally, the problem is all those idiots earning slightly less than the median yearly income buying expensive houses instead of choosing one of the many available cheaper houses that we of course have a massive glut of in here in Canada.
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Apr 18, 2021 02:08
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Nope, no possibility of a difference at all this time.
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Apr 18, 2021 02:15
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An increase in the money supply so large that it managed to travel back in time and cause housing prices to increase faster than incomes in the preceding 20 years.
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Apr 18, 2021 02:26
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It's pretty challenging imo to come up with a reason for why Vancouver house values suddenly rose so startlingly and insanely in 2014-2017 without factoring in some external factor like foreign capital. Without that you're basically just left with the CI thesis that housing became suddenly expensive overnight because Vancouverites are dumb, and moreso than that, uniquely dumber than everywhere else in Canada and the USA, which were impacted just the same by the same lax lending rules and low interest rates of that time period and yet didn't experience the spiking valuations that Vancouver experienced so severely. The thing about FOMO kicking off a housing mania of course is while some catalyst is needed, because we're talking about imperfect human nature, and insecurities here, and humans making decisions based on incomplete information, there's going to be an overreaction that has little relationship to the catalyst. In the example of Vancouver and foreign housing, this means that it while foreign investment was distorting the market to some degree, it's also very relevant that Vancouverites decided that foreign buying was going on, and this started impacting their decision making, even though they had no quantifiable knowledge of how much foreign capital was flowing into Vancouver and how that would impact their prospective house purchases. Another other thesis that I think has some merit for either an alternative explanation or at least a significant contributing factor is that during this time period of eye watering price increases, Vancouver, and to a lesser extent Toronto were at this unique inflection point where a city becomes large enough that there is no more land and the city has to start destroying highly desirable detached houses in order to make new homes. This creates a musical chairs effect where the amount of desirable homes (in CoV sub 50k and shrinking) starts to shrink while population continues to increase, causing incredible demand spikes for that vanishing single family lifestyle. And because the ~ lifestyle ~ of a SFH comes with all sorts of valuable intangibles (eg. exclusivity) this makes the amount that people are willing to spend even more unpredictable. So is this a viable alternative explanation to foreign capital? gently caress if I know. It sounds like a nice masters thesis for someone to pitch to their advisor, to dig into the house buying patterns of ~1900s Chicago or NYC and see what started to happen to house prices when it became clear that no one in "the middle class" would be able to afford a single family house in Manhattan any more.
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Apr 18, 2021 17:12
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Love that I'm funding everyone's retirement and get to die early myself.
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Apr 19, 2021 03:14
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Femtosecond posted:In the example of Vancouver and foreign housing, this means that it while foreign investment was distorting the market to some degree, it's also very relevant that Vancouverites decided that foreign buying was going on, and this started impacting their decision making, even though they had no quantifiable knowledge of how much foreign capital was flowing into Vancouver and how that would impact their prospective house purchases. Combine constant hints from realtors, who just want to make the transaction go through, that buyers were competing against indeterminate (but always large) amounts of foreign money when they almost certainly weren't, with the historically loose monetary and lending policies at the time, and yes, that scenario is anything but far-fetched.
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Apr 19, 2021 04:27
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Hot take: there is no bubble. Housing prices are high because a shortage of supply, exacerbated somewhat by real estate industry practices (e.g. blind bidding), low interest rates, money laundering, and speculation.
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Apr 19, 2021 20:15
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jettisonedstuff posted:Hot take: there is no bubble. Housing prices are high because a shortage of supply, exacerbated somewhat by real estate industry practices (e.g. blind bidding), low interest rates, money laundering, and speculation. I don’t know if you’re joking, but all of those things are exactly why it would be a bubble.
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Apr 19, 2021 20:44
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It's not a bubble, it's speculation lol
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Apr 19, 2021 20:47
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I don't understand blind bidding. In every purchase I've made down here in the US you could opt for an escalation clause in the offer, but you're never forced to guess what the next highest bid might be and risk guessing way high for no reason.
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Apr 19, 2021 20:50
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:I don't understand blind bidding. In every purchase I've made down here in the US you could opt for an escalation clause in the offer, but you're never forced to guess what the next highest bid might be and risk guessing way high for no reason. It’s just fomo, pure and simple. On top of that, I don’t think people in that state of mind are really thinking rationally, they are basically bargaining on an empty stomach, what’s an extra 100k over the next 25 years when you need a place to live now.
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Apr 19, 2021 20:57
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Realtors love blind bidding because they can just make poo poo up and say there's another offer on the table and get a quick 4000$ boost in commission.
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Apr 19, 2021 21:06
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Slotducks posted:Realtors love blind bidding because they can just make poo poo up and say there's another offer on the table and get a quick 4000$ boost in commission. Gotta say, I did a couple back and forths in a bidding war one particular time and the final sale price was was only $1000 more than my best offer. That realtor only made like $10 after desk fees for dealing with all the hassle in getting that final bid.
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Apr 19, 2021 21:14
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Back when I was buying my house (~13 years ago), the realtor said that the sellers liked everything about our offer (financing was locked in, gave them something like a 3-4 month window when the sale could happen), but they had another higher offer so could we come up another $900 to match it. I wanted to tell him to gently caress off, but decided not to let emotion get in the way of business. $900!
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Apr 19, 2021 21:26
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I'm surprised they told you how much you needed to go up. I never got anything that explicit, just "another offer is significantly higher than yours, do you want to offer more?"
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Apr 19, 2021 21:28
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qhat posted:I don’t know if you’re joking, but all of those things are exactly why it would be a bubble. Except for the lack of supply part, that just makes it high prices... because of lack of supply.
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Apr 19, 2021 22:23
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Cold on a Cob posted:I'm surprised they told you how much you needed to go up. I never got anything that explicit, just "another offer is significantly higher than yours, do you want to offer more?" The agent was making it up.
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Apr 19, 2021 22:35
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i don't think it's a bubble either. it's just unprecedented access to cheap credit, a lack of viable alternatives for investment and constrained supply. they literally aren't building more houses in places people actually want to work and live so it's only going to get worse from here better get a remote job and learn to love uhhh keremeos or eriau i guess
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Apr 20, 2021 00:49
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Subjunctive posted:The agent was making it up. Yeah probably, just weird they’d get specific like that.
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Apr 20, 2021 00:55
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the talent deficit posted:i don't think it's a bubble either. it's just unprecedented access to cheap credit, a lack of viable alternatives for investment and constrained supply. they literally aren't building more houses in places people actually want to work and live so it's only going to get worse from here Except access to cheap credit is a major driver of bubbles, and was in fact the cause of the largest asset bubbles in history. If there was no credit, there would be no bubbles, because there would be no reason to believe you owned anything more than than the physical assets you had in your direct possession.
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Apr 20, 2021 00:58
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I don't think there's a bubble, I think there's just a complex array of government policy, international money, cheap credit, and buyer mania combining to send prices skyrocketing.
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Apr 20, 2021 01:01
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Correct there is no bubble. Bubbles pop on their own. This is a tumour that has to be cut out
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Apr 20, 2021 01:02
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qhat posted:Except access to cheap credit is a major driver of bubbles, and was in fact the cause of the largest asset bubbles in history. If there was no credit, there would be no bubbles, because there would be no reason to believe you owned anything more than than the physical assets you had in your direct possession. i guess sure. bubble only pops when the credit taps are turned off tho, and that is not happening in our lifetimes. it would crater the economy
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Apr 20, 2021 01:04
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On no! Not the economy! It does so much for us.
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Apr 20, 2021 01:09
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the talent deficit posted:i guess sure. bubble only pops when the credit taps are turned off tho, and that is not happening in our lifetimes. it would crater the economy Why not? The dot-com and '07 bubbles popped within the same decade which both caused the credit taps to be turned off, why shouldn't we expect another in our lifetimes?
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Apr 20, 2021 01:10
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odiv posted:Back when I was buying my house (~13 years ago), the realtor said that the sellers liked everything about our offer (financing was locked in, gave them something like a 3-4 month window when the sale could happen), but they had another higher offer so could we come up another $900 to match it. My biggest gently caress you moment was offer number 12; only ever upped my offer once because I was blindsided by the interest in the house, the rest of the time my offer was my offer, take it or leave it. Me: I made my offer, over asking price Selling agent: there's multiple bids, do you want to raise? Me: No Selling agent: Okay, you're the top bidder, but the seller wants it to go for more, could you go for 20K over your offer? Me: gently caress off From what I heard later the story was kinda sad... neighbor wanted to sell her house so she convinced the 80 year old guy in the attached semi to move while the market was hot. She was using the guy and not happy at what the house was going for so she convinced him to hold out for more so her bid would be better.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:11
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stillvisions posted:My biggest gently caress you moment was offer number 12; only ever upped my offer once because I was blindsided by the interest in the house, the rest of the time my offer was my offer, take it or leave it. I mean that's kinda just normal negotiation. The leverage the seller held was to walk away, the selling agent hosed up by basically telling you outright that the seller was being a stickler. But whatever, their loss was your gain so gently caress 'em.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:34
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