B.C.?s finance minister says he expects to release new provincial data on foreign buyers in Metro Vancouver
ROB SHAW
The Province
B.C.’s finance minister says he expects to release new provincial data on foreign buyers in Metro Vancouver’s real estate market as early as next week.
Mike de Jong said Monday his government will publicly release the first data on citizenship in property transactions “in a week or so.”
“There’s lots of speculation about the magnitude of investment by foreign purchasers,” de Jong told radio station CKNW. “I’ve heard numbers as low as five per cent, and numbers as high as 30 per cent. Happily, we are collecting specific data that I intend to release very soon and we’ll get beyond the speculation and people will be able to deal in fact.”
The government began collecting citizenship data June 10, as part of a promise made in the February budget to collect more information about the impact of foreign buyers on rapid price increases in Metro’s real estate market.
Premier Christy Clark has been resisting calls for a foreign- buyers tax, or speculation tax, saying she needs to see more data on what is causing the housing price increases first. Meanwhile, critics have chastised her for not intervening to cool the housing market before it became unaffordable for local residents.
Under the new data rules, people are required to disclose if they are Canadian citizens on Property Transfer Tax forms, and if not, whether they are permanent residents of Canada or the foreign country in which they hold citizenship. The province also requires the citizenship of directors of corporations buying property, as well as the citizenship of beneficiaries of bare trusts (when a corporation sells property by selling the controlling shares of the business and the property does not technically change corporate owners on paper).
Clark has said she’ll begin rolling out her government’s housing strategy in the coming weeks. Last week, she revoked the ability of the real estate industry to police itself under self-regulation and said a beefed-up government superintendent of real estate would investigate and discipline real estate agents guilty of misconduct.
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