Blessed by the Potato

Hard to miss the news out of BC this week as a surprise tax on foreign purchasers of Vancouver-area real estate was launched, along with new data showing that foreign money in BC real estate is actually quite substantial.

It’s hard to say what this will mean in the near-term: will foreign money find a loophole and keep pouring in? Will Vancouver crash while the firehose of hot money shifts to Toronto and Victoria? Will 15% prove to be no kind of barrier considering that prices have gone parabolic this last year, and how desperate some of the hot money is to leave? Indeed, that last point had been made often enough before this news on the high prices and risk of a crash in Vancouver — “so what if it crashed even 75%, walking away with $500k clean is better than losing all $2M” people would argue.

No Grandfathering

The tax takes effect next week — a good move so we don’t see a spike in sales looking to beat the change, as we have with long-anticipated CMHC changes in the past. However, one strange aspect is that there’s no grandfathering in: deals that were already in the works that close after Aug 2 will have the tax applied.

For some people, that’s going to be exceptionally painful: not all foreign purchasers are wealthy oligarchs skirting capital controls. A newly recruited UBC assistant professor coming up from the US who happened to buy a place at the wrong time is going to have a huge cash call at closing soon, or will have to forfeit their deposit to walk away from the deal if their lawyer can’t argue force majeure.

Normally when a tax such as this is put into place there’s a grandfathering provision, where people who had already made deals under the old rules get taxed according to the old rules. Whether this lack of grandfathering is a bug or oversight from the rushed nature of this tax or a deliberate feature is another question.

How could it be a feature, you ask? Well, this tax is not so much about raising revenue or equalizing opportunities in the market so much as it is a psychological message. I even saw (though I didn’t keep the article to link) a BC official say that if this tax succeeds in its mission it won’t collect a single dollar — it’s intended to run foreign money out of Vancouver, not just tax it. And it does this in a flashy, surprising, attention-grabbing way. By sucker-punching a few deals in progress it will sacrifice a few innocent bystanders and create huge resentment and awareness amongst foreign buyers (and their local realtors) that BC is not a place to be making deals you can’t afford to have go sour. It will help address that sticky notion that Canada is a safe place to park (or in the parlance, launder) money, with stable, reasonable government that is gun shy on meaningful interventions.

Indeed, if there’s any good to come out of this, it will be the anecdotes from this (and from the Urbancorp mess in Toronto) reminding buyers that there is significant risk to “investing” in real estate, especially with long-duration pre-construction contracts at massive multiples of rent where anything can happen between when you sign and when you take delivery. Hopefully this pain will resonate for a generation, like Nortel did for reminding equity investors in Canada that risk exists. Your grandchildren will start saying that “real estate can only go up” and the neighbour will over-hear and shout over the fence “the BC tax on foreigners! Fly, you fools!”

And yes, there’s also the “they should’ve” arguments that draw away from the impending martyrdom — no “regular” person should be buying pre-construction, that’s a playground that by all rights should be restricted to accredited investors who can afford the risks and delays (of which a 15% surprise tax is actually not the worst thing that could have happened). And junior UBC profs and other people coming in to actually live in the city should have waited until they got their permanent residency status before buying (and rented even then, given the price-to-rent insanity in the city). But that’s cold comfort to people who face a large, surprise tax because of a lack of a simple grandfathering clause (and a tax that’s a cash call at that — no word yet that they will be able to roll this into a mortgage).

A Clear Message

What Next for the Bubble?

At the same time as the tax was in the news, CMHC finally woke up and labelled BC as having “problematic conditions.”

What effect will all this have on the bubble? Hard to say. Bubbles are driven by the madness of crowds. On the one hand there are reports of locals trying to back out of deals on the news of the tax — the existence of the tax has shattered their confidence in the meme that rich foreigners will continue to drive the price of property up to something on par with Monaco or New York. If confidence in “infinity” as the upper bound to GVA house prices has indeed been shattered, then that alone may help the market come back to earth regardless of what happens with HAM and whether the tax actually changes anything on that side of the equation. However, Vancouver in particular has been astoundingly immune to the forces of reality (WMAGNFARB), and eschatology is a scary and imprecise business. Plenty of bubbles have caught second and third winds (and the GVA is at least on its third wind now); some have “melted” while others were “like someone flicked off the lights.” Even that second type takes time to appreciate as it plays out in real time — RE does move very slow, and even what we call a “hard stop” in the history books is still several months of uncertainty in the present.

As for the GTA, it would not surprise me if enough people will believe that HAM will flood the 416 instead, driving the parabola for another year or so to apogee.

These things take time to sort out, and in the meantime my core message remains to rent and avoid the whole mess.