Spoiler!
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGnoRE
My issue with this solution is that it feels like giving regular homeowners a papercut when we should really be targeting investors that are speculating in the housing market. Nobody in the GVA and GTA should own more than one property. There is no reason why anyone needs to own a second property within the same city other than pure speculation. Increase property tax to 20% for second and third properties to make carrying costs too punitive to own multiple properties. If you want to invest your wealth, go look at stocks, bonds, bitcoin/nft, commercial real estate. rare art etc. My friend who's only in his early 30s owns 4 condos because he can. He started with 1 in 2015 and snowballed his way to 4. Its absolutely ridiculous but everyone and their mom is owning multiple properties in Toronto and Vancouver. Its literally, rich getting richer while the rest gets priced out. If you want to go in all-in on real estate so bad, then pool all our resources into one luxury property instead of multiple properties. If you want to secure housing for your children, buy one into each of their names but that should be the end of it.
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Following up on my previous post about why and how we need to tax speculation out of residential housing market, I came across an article that echoed my exact sentiment but with empirical data.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/202...d-make-it-hurt
From the article:
According to recent data from Teranet, Ontario’s land registry operator, nearly 25 per cent of homes purchased in the province in the first eight months of 2021 were by people who already owned at least one other property. In Toronto, that figure was nearly 30 per cent — more than first-time homebuyers or people moving from one home into another. Over the last decade, the market share controlled by multiple property owners has increased by 50 per cent.
We need to eliminate the potential for speculation out of the residential real estate market. This is by far the easiest and quickest solution that we have at our disposal currently. Whether its done through capital gains tax or property tax, if its done on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th property, it won't have a direct impact on regular homeowners. And for people with recreational properties, it shouldn't be hard for a policy to distinguish between a recreational property outside of GVA/GTA vs a second residential home within.