What do you do?

Yeah. Lots of whites and Asians with a decent amount of Hispanics thrown in.

Eomer said:

That's pretty much all the West coast cities. Portland, Seattle and Vancouver are the same.

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Don't include the city kept afloat by corrupt Chinese buying Canadian citizenship.

Buddy I play MTG with is Chinese. His family sells real estate here to factory owners back in China. Apparently the grift is that they all know the Chinese economy is a massive bubble propped up by the government, so they're trying to hold all their assets abroad to avoid confiscation. A factory in Guangzou can be nationalized, and bank accounts can be seized, but you can't take back a penthouse in London or New York.

I'm finishing last year of med school and then I'm proooobably off to germany to be a doctor. Norway was in consideration, but the jump is kinda big and I've been living in Czech republic all my life, it's time to switch it up a bit.

Heylel said:

Buddy I play MTG with is Chinese. His family sells real estate here to factory owners back in China. Apparently the grift is that they all know the Chinese economy is a massive bubble propped up by the government, so they're trying to hold all their assets abroad to avoid confiscation. A factory in Guangzou can be nationalized, and bank accounts can be seized, but you can't take back a penthouse in London or New York.

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How are they laundering money out of the country? China has strict currency controls.

Vinen said:

How are they laundering money out of the country? China has strict currency controls.

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I don't know all the details but I know it is fairly common for Chinese millionaires to buy property in luxury zip codes. I know Vancouver is pretty big for them as is a ton of places in southern California.

Cad said:

I imagine they take a decent haircut on these transactions to get their money out of the country, but 50% of money that can't be confiscated is better than 100% of money that can be.

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Again I don't know the ins-and-outs but places like Vancouver have imposed taxes on foreigners buying property. But the laws are ridiculously easy to bypass. You basically just form an LLC with a Canadian resident for the sole purpose of buying the property. Since the LLC meets requirements (I think it was like 25% of the board needed to be Canadian or something) the tax therefore does not apply. It is one of those things were locals will get angry about foreign buyers and the government will just pass a paper tiger law knowing it'll do nothing but will generate some positive press.

Tenks said:

Again I don't know the ins-and-outs but places like Vancouver have imposed taxes on foreigners buying property. But the laws are ridiculously easy to bypass. You basically just form an LLC with a Canadian resident for the sole purpose of buying the property. Since the LLC meets requirements (I think it was like 25% of the board needed to be Canadian or something) the tax therefore does not apply. It is one of those things were locals will get angry about foreign buyers and the government will just pass a paper tiger law knowing it'll do nothing but will generate some positive press.

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This literally happened in Vancouver only a month ago... 15% foreigner's tax, and it's been pretty controversial. I know places like Hong-Kong and Australia have had these in place for years though.

Haka said:

This literally happened in Vancouver only a month ago... 15% foreigner's tax, and it's been pretty controversial. I know places like Hong-Kong and Australia have had these in place for years though.

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Yeah, I'm not sure what Tenks is talking about in terms of evading that tax. I mean, I'm sure it'll happen eventually, but at this point the tax is basically a month old, and sales transactions have absolutely plummeted because of it. It's working as of right now. Prior to that, there was no need for them to buy through a corporation or anything like that. There was 10 million dollar houses owned by 19 year old university students and house wives and shit.

I have no doubt that it'll be gotten around fairly quickly, though. However, the impact on the psychology of the market might well be as significant as stemming the inward flow of money. Vancouver's market had gone fucking retarded at both the very high end, and the mid range. I doubt we'll see a huge drop in prices because it's such a desirable place to live, but shit had been going up by 10-20% a year for a long fucking time. Even if things just stagnate for awhile to let incomes catch up, that would be a good result.

Then again, it's just as likely that Victoria, Nanaimo, Comox, Kelowna, and other smaller places in BC are going to get swamped with Chinese money. My bro bought a pretty nice lakefront place in Kelowna last year, and he gets unsolicited offers on it damn near every week. A lot of that though is Canadians selling US property and bringing the money back home. But when half the BC housing market is now subject to a 15% tax for foreigners, there's going to be spillover to the rest of it.

My information came from reddit when the law was passed so I may have an incomplete or flat out wrong info. I'll try and dig it back up.

Here it is. Maybe someone more informed about law could confirm / deny.

Vancouver slaps 15% tax on foreign home buyers • /r/Economics

Fair enough, like I said, I doubt it'll be iron clad. People are just speculating in that thread, there doesn't appear to be any concrete information there (I spent all of 15 seconds reading as I fucking hate reddit's format/structure). In actual reality, like I said, real estate activity has fallen off a cliff in Vancouver since the tax was brought in. But I have no doubt there's a thousand slimy real estate agents and lawyers coming up with ways around it as we speak.

Heh, in BC new driver's have to have a green N in the back window. I don't spend much time in Vancouver, but last time I did, it seemed like half of the super high end cars had N's on them. Which basically means, rich Chinese kid.

Having just moved to Southern California seeing foreigners in super high end cars is now an hourly thing. It was really, really prominent at my temporary housing apartment. Literally people parking high end BMWs randomly like they were pieces of shit. The underground parking lot was littered with lambos, porches, Maserati and every other manner of high end car. Coming from Ohio where my WRX was considered a high end sports car it was quite the change