• BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    19 hours ago

    This is a red herring.

    I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That’s only 1-2 years of new building stock.

    It won’t hurt to do it, but it’s simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      We definitely need more housing across canada, but BC has been notorious for vacant homes and airbnb units, thus the ban on airbnb and the added vacancy tax out here.

      • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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        13 hours ago

        And it should be obvious that despite new regulations being put in for Foreign buyers, Vacant units, and Airbnb, the prices haven’t dropped to even pre-pandemic levels, let alone any useful amount, and they’re expected to keep climbing this year.

        These are all small red herrings that are easy PR wins for the government, but don’t actually do anything useful to the prices.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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          8 hours ago

          They did drop for us in Vancouver. I’m not suggesting it accounts for the high prices everywhere but it definetly had a market affect as airbnb people dumped their additional units. One owner had over 40

          • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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            4 hours ago

            Or it just happened to coincide with a massive jump in interest rates which also affected prices elsewhere that didn’t implement these policies.

            • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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              3 hours ago

              No there are articles about the affect upon announcement and then institution

              • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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                3 hours ago

                and yet if you go look at the charts for say Vancouver and Toronto over the same period of time you can clearly see there’s little to no effect from BC’s policy changes.

                And it’s still a couple million dollars to buy a detached home in Vancouver, and the cheapest 2 bedroom condo is a half million (and it’s literally on East Hastings) with most normal 2 bedrooms being listed at $600-700k

                These policies haven’t made anything affordable, and they aren’t going to make things affordable.

                • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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                  1 hour ago

                  Oh they didn’t make it affordable, I just meant we saw price drop in market and assessments. Prices here are ridiculous. We paid 415k for 2 bedroom apartment, now it is 575k but before the changes they were selling for 675k sight unseen, just buyers snapping them up

    • k0e3@lemmy.ca
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      13 hours ago

      As someone who’s trying to move back to Canada, I’m also reading that a lot of the places owned by these investors are basically useless boxes that no local would live in. So even if they got freed up, there’d be very little demand for them.