B.C. business leaders call for residential real estate data

JOANNE LEE-YOUNG, Vancouver Sun

B.C. business leaders are joining the chorus of voices calling for more granular residential real estate data.

The provincial government stated in its last budget that it would track the citizenship and residency of owners who are not Canadians in future transactions. But the B.C. Chamber of Commerce is now calling for this kind of information to be made available about existing and past owners.

“We’re saying that’s great to look at the information going forward, but we also want to look at the last 20 years in the housing market and to recreate that data to get a full picture of what the change is in ownership between permanent residents, foreign investors and Canadian citizens,” said Dan Baxter, the Chamber’s director of policy development, government and stakeholder relations. 

Baxter said this fuller picture is needed in order to consider which “policy levers” can help to balance the need for foreign investment against the need to tackle housing affordability.

“The big thing with the housing affordability issue for businesses is that (their) employees need to have good housing,” said Baxter. 

“You hear about foreign ownership tax measures taken in other jurisdictions such as Australia. But to know if you need for local levels of government to do that (here), there is more value in information that is collected over time rather than just a snapshot of (ownership) from 2016.”

This week, some 200 delegates from across the province met in Kelowna for the B.C. Chamber of Commerce’s annual general meeting to vote on new policies that become part of the organization’s agenda. 

The organization, which says it represents 36,0000 B.C. businesses, stopped short of passing a third motion to call for an increase in the property transfer tax rate for real estate purchases by “foreign, non-resident purchasers and foreign-controlled companies to an amount sufficient to cover the additional cost of upgrades to data collection systems, cost of data collection, data analysis, reporting and fraudulent claim investigations.”

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