Some of the hand wringing and debate over foreign buyers snapping up real estate in the capital region might have been for naught, information released Tuesday by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada suggests.
Data in CMHC’s December issue of Housing Market Insight show that 1.1 per cent of the region’s condominiums are owned by non-residents — defined as people whose primary residence is outside of Canada.
While the trend shows a slight increase from the 0.9 per cent of non-residents who owned units in the region in 2016, CMHC reports that the percentage of non-resident owners was 1.1 per cent in 2014 and 1.0 per cent in 2015.
Ara Balabanian, president of the Victoria Real Estate Board, said there’s no surprise in that information.
“I think it underlines the point we have made that foreign ownership is not a driving force in the Greater Victoria area,” Balabanian said.
He said that while the region did see a small increase in foreign buyers after the province instituted a 15 per cent foreign buyer’s tax on residential purchases in Vancouver in August 2016, there was never enough to warrant a similar tax here.
“We have always had that [overflow effect]. Victoria has always been a great place for people from Vancouver to move to when the time is right,” Balabanian said, noting those who move get more bang for their buck while maintaining the same West Coast lifestyle.
Still, as late as April of this year, the City of Victoria was considering pushing the province to institute a similar tax here to cool off what was one of the hottest real-estate markets in the country.
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said she has since been convinced that such a tax would be a bad idea, and said CMHC’s figures suggest it’s unnecessary.
“And what I know in working with the Chinese community and others, including the technology sector, is that people who come to Victoria from China and the U.S. — and anywhere else — is they come to live here and become part of our community,” she said.
Helps said there’s little chance city council will revisit the foreign buyers tax any time soon.
“And I hope not, particularly if we are making evidence-based and data-driven decisions,” she said.
Braden Batch, CMHC’s senior market analyst for Victoria, said future data releases should offer more insight into the breakdown of ownership in the region — how Victoria fares, compared with other municipalities, for example.
“Another key insight that came from that release was that non-resident ownership tends to occur in more central municipalities in Toronto and Vancouver,” he said. “We will learn if this is true for Victoria as well, as more data is released. My assumption is that it would be similar.”
The CMHC-StatCan research was geared toward the Vancouver and Toronto markets, both of which have instituted foreign buyers taxes.
StatCan reported that 4.8 per cent of the residential properties in Greater Vancouver and 3.4 per cent of Greater Toronto were owned by non-residents.
In Vancouver, non-resident ownership was most concentrated in the city of Vancouver (7.6 per cent), followed by Richmond (7.5) and West Vancouver (6.2).
The largest share of non-resident ownership in Vancouver was in the condo market, where non-residents owned 7.9 per cent of all units.
The survey was the first time CMHC and Statistics Canada measured foreign ownership in the country’s hot housing markets to see how much influence foreign buyers have when prices increase.
