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Friday, April 25, 2014

Why Toronto House Prices are so High

Just saw this article on Yahoo/Reuters about how mainland Chinese are buying up properties sight-unseen in the USA etc.  Although it does not mention Canada, which is just poor journalism, I went to the websites like www.juwai.com and found that the bulk of the properties listed are Canadian in Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary.  Lots of helpful information for the Chinese on immigration, taxes, how to get children into schools, etc.

I also talked to a real estate agent in Toronto the other day and she gave me her standard speech on why Toronto houses are going to continue to increase in price.  It was basically "..foreign and immigrant buyers are going to continue to buy..prices will go up..Canadians will be priced out of the market".  Not sure why she thought that last point was a good thing, but it is certainly good for the real estate brokers.

By the way, I am not against immigration as I am an immigrant myself.  Most past immigrants, like my family, started out stretching to rent a decent place like an apartment or duplex, then slowly moved up the housing ladder as they succeeded in Canada.  Distorting Canada's premier housing market to absurdity with rich offshore (not immigrant) buyers is an issue to be addressed in my opinion.

Here are some snippets in native Chinese script and google-translated English from the Juwai.com website.


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