|
qhat posted:From the group 'BC Landlords', incase anyone didn't realize landlords were the pettiest bastards; Got a little vomit coming up there when seeing landlords refer to exploitation of housing as "our industry". An industry must produce something of value and landlords produce nothing. Anyway, expropriating private rentals would be awesome as hell. Something as basic and critical as housing cannot be morally run as a means of profit and the existing hodgepodge of social housing and rent subsidization is not sufficient. I recall reading a prediction a few years ago that the US would have fully nationalized rentals by 2030. The theory was that as government put more and more restrictions in place to protect tenants that it would eventually only be viable for the government to be the landlord. Maybe a bit optimistic but considering rent control, no winter evictions, no credit or criminal checks allowed, etc. in certain areas I could see it happening. And perhaps this could also lead to a bit more stabilization in housing prices if you no longer have people buying 'investment' properties.
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2021 14:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:03 |
|
|
leftist heap posted:house-obsessed millennials Goddamn millenials wanting to live in houses. They're ruining everything.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2021 13:29
|
|
|
evilpicard posted:It loving owns that the only way to have 2 offices and a bedroom. when both people work from home is to rent half a duplex from amateur landlords who double as Canada's worst handyman and then kick you out right at 12 months when their family situation changes. 3 times in 3 years. Haha yeah, I'd have to double-check but I'm pretty sure we combined for decently over 200k last year. We were living in a relatively massive 1300 sq. ft. 2-bedroom rental in False Creek but the rent was quickly getting out of hand. We looked for months in Vancouver, going further and further east. Aging small condo in Burnaby for 600+, to a cat-pee smoked-in garbage dump in new west for 600, suburban hell living Coquitlam. It took us a bit to come to terms with it but we eventually just said "gently caress this poo poo" and moved to Ottawa last year. 1500 sq ft semi-detached in an excellent location for our wants and needs for 550k. It's 160 years old but in relatively great shape, no weird old wiring or plumbing or anything. The crazy thing is this place would probably now sell for 50k more than we paid. We made it to Ottawa just in time as prices are going nuclear here also. I don't know how other people in our age cohort or younger are supposed to do this.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2021 13:59
|
|
|
Purgatory Glory posted:Here's the end game: I read more and this story is kind of hilarious on all sides now. So he now says he's going to put a pig farm on it (the only suitable use) theoretically as some sort of pressure to remove it from the ALR, not sure of the logic there. Anyhow, now the neighbours are all up in arms because they don't want to live next to a pig farm and say it will devalue their homes. So you've got a guy doing farming on farmland as some kind of gambit to remove it from the ALR. And then NIMBY neighbours complaining about farming when they bought homes next to farmland. Meanwhile the Sooke council is like "lol, farming is what we want you to do with it?"
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2021 13:38
|
|
|
yippee cahier posted:I can echo that there are very few people I can bitch about this to, because most of my mid-late 30s friends are just trying to make rent. I agree with tagesschau, this is theoretically where the money comes from but the numbers cannot possibly work out on anything purchased relatively recently. As an example the place that we moved out of in False Creek re-rented for $3000/month. Obviously yes, that is a lot, but similar units are selling for 1.2 million or more. Even at the incredibly low rates we have right now that's not anywhere near covering even the mortgage payments. Add on the significant condo fees, property taxes, and you're even more in the hole. I looked at Padmapper and people are trying to rent these things for $4000+ which I'm not sure that the rental market can bear and you're still not covering costs there. Any new-ish purchaser trying to rent can be undercut by a massive amount by people that bought 20 years ago. I just don't see "investment properties" as viable in any city with these skyrocketing prices if they're supposed to be self-supporting. It has to be people banking on further huge appreciation and they're either already wealthy people who will be fine either way or small-timers who are betting everything on housing.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2021 15:08
|
|
|
I read that story earlier this morning. Yeah, completely laughable. I think those 3 options are good but there's gotta be something more like they can get their lease reinstated if they want and also become exempt from all rent increases for 5 years or something. In addition to the punitive fine of course.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2021 13:10
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I still strongly think it should be nearly impossible for a landlord to kick someone out for any reason other than like actively destroying the place or simply not paying rent. You want to re-develop the property? Tough poo poo, wait for the tenant to move out or pay for them to leave. Your daughter is moving into town to go to school and you want to give her the suite to live in? Tough poo poo, she can move in when the previous tenant leaves like anyone else. You want to renovate the unit? Better work something out with the tenant then. Building just changed owners? Doesn't matter to the tenants, their rental agreements remain the same and just as ironclad. Even to the owner themselves moving in, it should not be allowed unilaterally. Forcibly removing someone from their home is so extreme that like you say, it should only be possible in the most limited of circumstances. Oh and there better be some harsh punishment for any BS from the landlord regarding situations where they make life so hard for the tenant that they feel they have to leave. I recall a story about a landlord somewhere in the maritimes I think who removed their tenants front door. That's not just fines imo, that's prison time. Or government seizure of their property. Whatever works.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2021 13:47
|
|
|
Cold on a Cob posted:Time to move to Thunder Bay to get ahead of the climate refugees Coincidentally I was just discussing this with my wife a few days ago. Ottawa definitely has climate plans but one city cannot do anything to change the fact that this area could become fairly unlivable within say 40 years, being conservative. You gotta choose the right time to head north and unfortunately Thunder Bay is somehow the furthest north. I wonder when governments start doing climate investment in building northern cities.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2021 13:42
|
|
|
Because as we all know, real estate transactions are private information??? drat my local Land Registry Office is leaking all kinds of private information to me about former owners of my property.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2021 13:23
|
|
|
Yeah I'm sure the renters will appreciate it until however long it takes for the units to turn over and their next apartment's rent is even higher. Is it too much to ask for some forward thinking in policies? I don't know how much housing you could build for however much that would cost but I'm sure it's a decent amount.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2021 14:11
|
|
|
MickeyFinn posted:I know you are being sarcastic, but I think the bolded part is fairly true. The problem is that housing prices are being distorted by the fact that there are no substitutes (or very poor substitutes, like being homeless) and that people cannot enter and leave the market at will. That suggests that this market is very inefficient at price discovery. Doesn't it? It's probably at least fairly decent for a lot of things, but yeah, housing is not an efficient market. If things get out of hand on a basic need I don't think we're going to be counting on the free market. I guess there's also something to be said that people refer to 'free market' a lot, but there is no true free market. Literally everything that I can think of is subject to some kind of regulations be it for safety, health, whatever. In a true free market you get to decide for yourself whether the meat you're about to eat will infect you with a deadly parasite! Fun!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2021 13:32
|
|
|
It's not like it costs anything so at worst you're losing maybe 10 minutes to file it and probably 20 minutes if you show up to a hearing.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2021 13:19
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:It costs $50, which you get back if you win. Ah poo poo really, I don't know why I thought it was free. They should make it a free service for tenants but charge landlords double to make up for it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2021 13:19
|
|
|
What garbage human approved that, haha. Blind bidding isn't about the absolute end price, it's about knowing that your agent hasn't conned you into offering $20,000 more than necessary so that they can pocket a few hundred more which is my default assumption. It wouldn't solve much of the problem but realtors need to be regulated to an extreme degree and this helps a little bit. I think we can agree that if something makes OREA mad it must be a really good idea.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 26, 2021 13:32
|
|
|
large hands posted:don't hate the player, hate the game I feel very comfortable hating the players to be honest.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2021 13:06
|
|
|
linoleum floors posted:In which two Toronto bartenders on cerb are able to get a mortgage and buy a house in bracebridge So Bracebridge looks like the middle of nowhere but I looked and the prices are still quite high. They must have gotten one of the cheaper places I expect if their mortgage is half their rent. I saw a few things for around 250,000. I can't imagine starting over again as a banking intern in my 40s but I hope it works out for them. I prefer seeing this than the latest BlogTO article about 2 finance execs buying their 2nd Muskoka cottage for 3.5 million because it has slightly better lake views and then they can AirBnB it on the side.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2021 13:36
|
|
|
McGavin posted:The future of real estate is NFTs of houses. We're already there. And it looks like garbage. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/03/22/mars-house-krista-kim-nft-news/ Hilariously the person that she contracted to model the house is off of Fiverr or something and is laying claim to ownership.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2021 13:39
|
|
|
Femtosecond posted:If you want to watch something that'll make you sick to your stomach, here's Justin Trudeau responding to a question asking what he's going to do about people treating housing as an investment causing skyrocketing price increases by enthusiastically saying that housing is an investment and one he wants you to get into! I believe he was probably trying to spin it as "an investment in your future!" kind of thing, but in any case, definitely sidestepping the actual question that he didn't want to answer.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2021 13:21
|
|
|
Agreed, at its core the NDP is still a 'status quo' party, because otherwise they would be as irrelevant as the Green Party. 500,000 new affordable rental units over 10 years probably does not even keep up with new demand, never mind closing the gap. 30-year mortgage terms and doubling the tax credit is shuffling furniture around that does nothing to address affordability. There is some potentially good stuff in there regarding helping co-ops and such, but that's like swimming up a waterfall. Apparently no one is willing to be actually radical.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2021 13:18
|
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:My condo building in BC wants me to pay $10k because there's water leaking into the balconies or some poo poo. Shouldn't this be coming out of the reserve? Have you taken a look at your strata's financial state recently? If you're lucky there might be a couple hundred thousand in the reserve. Condo building insurance rates skyrocketed over the last 5 years in BC, like often more than doubling. In any case, any expenditure other than routine maintenance is going to lead to special assessments. The costs of big-ticket items at the scale of an apartment building (and regulatory requirements) are simply too big to be covered by strata fees. Those commercial-scale fire alarm panels that can pinpoint which alarm was the trigger? Hundreds of thousands to replace. Reserve funds would have to be funded into the millions. It's honestly one of the things that drove us away from Vancouver. We couldn't accept paying 600k+ for an 'ok' condo which will have an additional 4-500 in strata fees every month and then it's only a matter of time until the inevitable special assessment comes. People with the privilege to have access to enough capital to buy a non-apartment come out ahead here I think. The initial outlay is higher but I'm betting in a lot of cases the ongoing costs are actually lower as long as you do some maintenance.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2021 13:28
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:I mean, they're not too big if the fees are set so that they cover them, but as you note the fees would probably have to be more like $1K/month rather than $500/month. But yeah, this is something which should really be regulated, rather than leaving it up to strata boards to deliberately put off. Having the for-profit insurance industry become de facto regulators is just not a recipe for happiness. Yes, that is the other part. Generally the developer operates as the 'council' until all the units are sold or a certain date or something like that. They will always set the maintenance fees to be $250/month or something stupid low because it helps them sell the units and they're free and clear of any obligations by the time any big work needs to be done. The first thing any strata should do upon creation is double the maintenance fees. I just don't know how you could sell it as a good purchase when you're buying in at 600k with an additional minimum 1k off the bat. I actually do prefer the special assessment way of doing things, it lets you keep control of your own money for longer and councils can only invest CRF money in very conservative things like bonds, t-bills, and GICs.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2021 14:31
|
|
|
MickeyFinn posted:Do these buildings have a professional manager paid to be on site and keep track of this sort of stuff, or do the councils just wait until there are too many false fire alarms or something like that? Yeah, varies by location. I only know BC has requirements on councils to get professional reports every X some time period. Doesn't mean that they'll actually do the maintenance though. The report will say that to be confident they need to collect X dollars every year in strata fees, and to do that they need to raise the fees 45%. Well, that's never going to happen so they defer everything as long as they can until the building is in terrible shape. This goes on across the sector until half the apartment building stock is in disrepair and insurance companies have to increase their rates because it's basically guaranteed that something extremely costly is going to happen. You have to hope that your strata council has the foresight to actually keep the building in good financial shape as opposed to not wanting to upset the owners who don't want to pay for anything because they're putting 60% of their income into the mortgage. A lot of buildings do have professional managers but they can't force the council to do anything unfortunately.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2021 14:47
|
|
|
It sounds like it's probably not the best development site or type, but on the other hand I'm still going to enjoy it if it makes homeowners mad.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2021 14:00
|
|
|
large hands posted:Letter from a landlord making the rounds on Twitter, apparently they own 3 houses: Oh man, I would love for them to make that ARI application to the RTB. I'm sure they'd all have a good laugh. You can only get that if there has been some massive increase in expenses out of your control (definitely didn't happen) or if the financing of the property is dependent on the rent and it was somehow unforeseeable that the current rent wouldn't be sufficient. I read the line about selling to family as a threat that they'll sell to family who will kick them out for "own use" and then immediately re-rent it. Whoever received this should tell them to gently caress off and make sure they document every single thing this rear end in a top hat does and keep a very close eye on the buyer if they do actually sell.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2021 13:30
|
|
|
Seriously, why is everyone chomping at the bit to be a landlord? There's some hosed-up brain worms infecting people to want to contribute to the ongoing downfall of housing as a basic right and instead hyper-capitalize it. Super cool, if I hang on to this condo I can exploit the poo poo out of someone poorer than me based purely on possession of capital and not providing any kind of actual value, sounds great! But it's true, you get viewed as an idiot if you're not out there extracting every last cent from the people 'below' you.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2021 13:10
|
|
|
Gotta wonder what happens when interest rates return to 4-5% levels. So many people are on the edge with their mortgages. I'm not sure I believe that the stress test has actually prepared people.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2021 13:42
|
|
|
half cocaine posted:No I mean if you have taken out a mortgage on a 1 million condo with a 100k down payment, why is it ok for the bank to come after you for 900k if it halves in value? Why shouldn't the bank be forced to take a haircut of 450k? There's been some other rambling here but this all feels disconnected. You were loaned 900k dollars secured by the value of the home. It would be the same if it was a bank or an individual or whatever that loaned you money that was backed by some asset. The fact that it's housing and banks seems immaterial, it's just the contract in the end.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2021 14:10
|
|
|
Cold on a Cob posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/q53van/whenever_you_can_kick_these_fking_tenants_out_my/ Wondering about the agent who's "ready to offer when you can kick these tenants out". If they're going to live in the house they can remove the tenants themselves. If they want to re-rent it then the only way they're getting these tenants out is paying them off. Just curious what the agent thinks the sellers could possibly do. The obvious move is for the buyers to do the usual fake "personal use" eviction. Which still drives me nuts. Taking someone's home from them is such a severe action that the punishment for doing it falsely needs to be as severe. If you do it your house should be seized by the government and turned into social housing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 13:28
|
|
|
I would love to get that letter from a landlord. Illegally witholding return of last month's rent? I've only lived in Ontario for 1.5 years but I seem to recall that in BC it's triple damages on failure to return the deposit.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2021 13:21
|
|
|
Cold on a Cob posted:Mortgage broker doesn’t want us to register the house…? This is the scammiest scam I've ever heard of. I'm guessing that there's also a fake lawyer involved with this fake mortgage broker. I'm going to say that the 50% they put down via bank draft to the lawyer is going to disappear. The broker has to 'provide' the missing 50% because they're not going to be able to fool the bank providing the mortgage with their fake lawyer. They ask for the delay in registering to give themselves time to disappear because obviously the whole deal is going to fall through and they need to be gone before anyone has figured that out. The way I describe it does sound pretty shaky though so I must be missing some parts. Other alternative is this guy is just faking up mortgage acceptance to the last second so that he can push them into some kind of private financing deal to "save the deal" where he can charge them some inflated rate. My main question is what 'friend' recommended them to use a scammer. They must have known?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2021 14:07
|
|
|
Franks Happy Place posted:I wonder how much more money you could get by upping your buyers commission to like 5% and just relying on the sheer greed of realtors to somehow convince all their clients to win the bidding war on your place. That could actually work pretty well I think. We needed a realtor for the simple distances involved in our purchase but we were the ones suggesting houses we were interested in. Are there actually a lot of people that just don't do any looking themselves and go completely on what their realtor brings to them? Because that's crazy.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2021 13:30
|
|
|
I just wonder how to get around it now that they're so ingrained. There are small forays into bypassing them with the direct bidding websites and things like PurpleBricks (which still has realtors). The problem is that they are self-protective so agents don't show buyers the FSBO or purplebricks houses because of course their commission will be impacted, and they also don't want to normalize someone doing a real estate transaction without a realtor. Gotta pay the real estate mafia if you want the best selection of houses or buyers.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2021 13:30
|
|
|
Femtosecond posted:Looks like the Kiwis finally gave up on trying to solve their problem by simply banning foreigners and other demand side action. They're gonna ban exclusive SFH zoning in the major cities and are increasing the max density of what is allowed on every residentially zoned lot. drat that's pretty cool. I can just imagine the fury of the oldsters if they banned SFH zoning in Ottawa, good lord. Although of course Ottawa encompasses a massive area so it's not like it would have to be done across the entire city. They lost their minds over a proposal for a single big tower near Dow's Lake as it will "ruin the character of the neighbourhood" and apparently turn Ottawa into Toronto. I'm one to talk of course, living in a heritage district, absolutely no densification can occur anywhere near me.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2021 13:16
|
|
|
If you're only small in comparison to BlackRock then I'm going to venture that you're not actually small. Anyway, I guess this means that Toronto doesn't have any AirBnb regulations akin to Ottawa? Ottawa banned short-term rentals in anything except primary residences and you still need a permit for that. Also, that Jericho lands plan looks great. Are there any updates on what they're doing with south false creek?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2021 13:18
|
|
|
So they're going to jam in a ton of 'luxury' towers like the north side that have 50 stories of $2 million shoeboxes. Still wondering where your average family with 2 children is supposed to live that isn't the forsaken suburbs, because I know nobody is putting 3 bedrooms in these things.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2021 13:21
|
|
|
qhat posted:https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/dan-fumano-b-c-man-cries-foul-over-vacancy-tax-on-home-of-21-years Yeah okay, he's satellite family by the definition of the law, but by the spirit of the law I think he has a point. Do you think this guy is actually speculating or something? I mostly find it weird that he's married to someone and they see each other maybe 2 months or so a year? Mantle posted:Canadian Debt Thread: millionaires are not the wealthy They are not. When we talk about taxing the wealthy are we really talking about taxing the average person who owns a home in Metro Vancouver or anyone who owns a home within 100km of Toronto? A reminder that a fairly large majority of Canadians own a home. Are they all wealthy? I don't think I'm going to be convinced that someone who bought a house 40 years ago (or inherited one) but has total other assets worth $150,000 is wealthy. Even if they sell and profit to over a million, then what? They still have to live somewhere. I just find it a massive misdirection of effort to try and target people in the 1-2 million dollar range. You can end up in that range from having a high-paying but still 'contributor' level career. They are (mostly) not the people driving inequality or exploiting low-income people. Tackle the ones who are leveraging over and over to amass properties that they're speculating on. Tackle the actual wealthy who have tens of millions of dollars. I could go on but I think you see the point.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 14:23
|
|
|
Mantle posted:The thinking is: A person with 1 million dollars in assets is not wealthy because there are people with 10s of millions of dollars. mila kunis posted:Yep. Considering people who fully own a 2 million dollar property as anything other than rich is loving insanity lol I'm saying I don't care about this relative definition of wealthy, it's just semantics, and doesn't contribute at all to determining policy. 'Wealthy' has no hard definition so you're going to get numbers all over the place. When I hear something like 'wealth tax' I think of something that targets the top 1%-2%-ish. Sounds like I disagree on what constitutes a wealthy person but we're probably in very similar places on taxing transfers from parents to children. This whole thing started with talk about taxing gifts to children that they use to buy houses. Sounds good to me, we should be taxing large gifts and inheritances for sure. The real discussion is what are the specific numbers and allowances for that tax. Canada is the only G7 without an inheritance tax which is crazy. I would lean towards something that allows for only a token inheritance and the rest goes...somewhere. Children of rich people already have a leg up due to having free choice of schools, parents contacts, better health care, etc. I'm mostly interested with how to extend that to gifts while the parents are still alive while still allowing for literal birthday gifts and that sort of thing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2021 13:55
|
|
|
half cocaine posted:https://twitter.com/cbcnewsbc/status/1454433660418015235?s=21 Who are you even trying to lay your sick burns on? Vancouver and Toronto have chronically undertaxed properties for years.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2021 16:06
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I remember when the first house tax came up there were protests of local rich homeowners. They'd always come up with these hypothetical people they were protesting on behalf of. "A poor senior with a health condition that needs to spend time in the dry air of the Okanagan so owns 2 4 million dollar homes on her tiny pension but the new tax is going to force her to sell one of them." Yes, there are some people in that kind of situation but like Truman said, they can just defer the property tax and take it out of the estate. In the end, there's probably someone somewhere who doesn't qualify for deferral but will also have to sell their home due to property taxes. There's always corner cases.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2021 14:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:03 |
|
|
half cocaine posted:we need more supplllyyyyyyyghdb I'm not entirely clear on what 'residential investment' means, but I'm assuming this is saying that 10% of our GDP is stuck in residential real estate. Very cool and good,.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2021 13:35
|
|