Canadian Government extends foreign buyer ban

Canada has been grappling with the impact of foreign investments on its real estate market for years, so they say. In an effort to cool down soaring housing prices and maintain affordability for Canadian residents, the Trudeau liberals implemented a ban of foreign buying of Canadian residential real estate with small exceptions in 2022. This ban has now been extended, despite the measure showing little to no relief for Canadian residents looking to house themselves.

Apparently policy makers are hoping the ban will eventually address housing affordability concerns, critics are fast to point out the short comings of the policy and bring forth some added concerns on their own. They believe, that restricting foreign investment may deter internation buyers from investing in Canada alltogether. This could have a much larger economic impact and affect overall economic growth, job creation and ultimately range into other industry fields than just the real estate market.

While the long term impact of these measure may not be visible for years to come, it is clear, that governments usually don't have their fingers on the puls of time and their policies are sometimes bad and other times desasterous for their countries. May I suggest, that we let the market regulate the crisis? In my over 22 years of selling real estate in more than half a dozen countries I have never seen a single government meddling policy produce the result it is intended for. Most often it creates some sort of opposite effect and takes away from markets' abilities to come to an equilibrium. Unleash the market by taking away the red tape, constrain the burden of taxes and fees to a minimum and allow the market to use the resources (land) to its best abilities and you will see, that housing can at least be kept at an affordable rate once building activities have outpaced the huge demand for housing, that currently isn't being serviced.