Chinese Markham real estate flyers promote overseas buyers

Yorkregion.com
April 20, 2017
By Tim Kelly

The largely Chinese-language real estate flyers, with some English added, keep coming to Christiane Bergauer-Free's Unionville address week after week.

She unloads a thick manila envelope of colourful pamphlets full of hard-sell promises.

"Overseas cash buyers ready to buy!"

"Unique marketing tools direct to overseas cash buyers."

"We sell over your house value."

It's clear the pitch will be directed to deep-pocketed overseas Chinese buyers who will over-pay for your property.

Perhaps that's what Premier Kathleen Wynne had in mind when her Liberal government announced a 15-per-cent "non-resident speculation tax" on purchasers of properties in the Greater Toronto and Golden Horseshoe Area April 20.

The goal is to slow down price increases in the region, which have jumped 33 per cent in the past year, raising the price of the average single-family home above $1.2 million.

The vast majority of buyers in Markham over the past few years have been foreign, real estate agents yorkregion.com has spoken to over the past few weeks say.

Those agents were all in favour of a foreign buyers tax, some advocating for a tax as high as 50 per cent, others indicating it should be at least 25 per cent to cool off foreign purchases.

Anne Cairns, who has been an agent for three decades, is concerned young people won't be able to buy a home because of the inflated home prices due to what speculators and foreign buyers will pay for them.

"We're having a lot of investors who are not moving into York Region properties... all they're doing is buying homes and leaving them empty. We need funds out of our investors.

"If we have a non-resident tax like Vancouver, we may have a bit of a slowdown."

Jennifer Jones, another agent who has been locally selling for 12 years, said she believes foreign buyers make up as much as 90 per cent of the Markham market. A local developer has also suggested that as much as 90 per cent of the money for home purchases is coming from Asia.

"To allow people who don't even live in the country to do the investing, that's totally not right," said Jones.

"There needs to be some huge tax, a foreign-buyer's tax," she said, in agreement with the government's measure.

For Markham Councillor Karen Rea, whose motion to write to the Ontario government to propose a foreign buyer's tax of 15 per cent last month was defeated 8-4, the province's move was welcomed.

"The news this morning was long overdue," she said. "Markham now will have the tools to also implement a vacancy tax for our unoccupied and some unmaintained homes."

Regional Councillor Joe Li, who voted against Rea's motion and said at the meeting last month he didn't like that a foreign buyer's tax implicated "the Chinese", was less impressed by Thursday's move.

"Instead of singling out the foreign buyer only to pay a 15 per cent tax, the Ontario government should provide a broad-based solution like implementing a tax levy on everyone that does not meet the minimum five-year residency and ownership requirement," he said.