Foreign Buyers Going In For Low Cost Properties

From the November property transfer tax data, it indicated that 4.1 per cent of all residential transactions in the area for that period were from foreign buyers. It increased by three per cent during October but was still less than one per cent of the real estate dealings which comprises of foreign buyers due to the introduction of the 15-per-cent tax.

Before the tax was introduced, 204 real estate dealings that involved foreigners during November was just part of the 1,974 Metro Vancouver encountered weeks before the endorsement of the tax. Based on a real estate finance, Andrey Pavlov, the tax seems to be effective and having a strong hold over the market.

Audrey mentioned; “There is a huge drop. There may be some seasonal variation like there normally would be on all transactions, but the drop is so significant that it couldn’t possibly be explained by seasonal variation.” Most foreign buyers are running away from the expensive homes in the market, there were only eight properties worth at least $3 million dollars that were bought by foreigners in November. The figure declined by 95 during July, the other cheaper market sold up to 304 homes in that same period.

In the first six months beginning in June, resident properties were bought by foreign buyers for $3.5 billion in total and $295.8 million overall in the month of November. The initial effort that was made to keep track of foreign purchases that was recorded during that month.  It makes it harder to have compared the current number since there are no data gotten from the past year, thus, drawing up a conclusion concerning the effect of the tax will be quite difficult. Pavlov said; “We’re not going to have apples to apple comparisons until next June.”

The good news is that there is a lot of cash flowing in from the new levy, there has been more than $49 million in supplement revenue that the province has brought in from foreign buyers, the province plan on using the cash to reinvest into more housing projects that will be cheaper. The number has doubled compared to November’s own, which was $24 million.