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A comment on Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals. Parent comment

Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by bdamm on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @07:27PM (#16816747)
This is even more clear when you contrast housing supply to population growth. Population growth in Vancouver, Canada has been stable; almost linear, and relatively low. Meanwhile, housing supply has exploded across the region. Yet, housing remains unobtainable to the vast majority of residents. What is going on? It clearly is not a supply problem, and perhaps even worse, there could be a massive supply glut that for reasons I can only speculate has not become available for occupancy.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by lazyasciiart on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @09:10PM (#16817235)
Population growth is higher than housing growth and has been for a long time, it's not that complicated. http://udi.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Q2-2017-State-of...
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by bobthepanda on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @08:52PM (#16817156)
This is not necessarily indicative of anything; I don't if this applies to Vancouver, but a big portion of why DC and Manhattan have bustling residential demand despite having less population than their historical peaks is that there has been a general reduction in household size due to various factors. So you could have the same amount of people but a much higher amount of households.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by mrgordon on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @08:58PM (#16817178)
Normally the news articles say its Chinese investors parking their money in Vancouver housing since it is likely to be stable compared to the yuan, etc.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by msie on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @09:29PM (#16817313)
Ah yes, the Chinese investor bogeyman. Apparently there are enough millionaires to cause problems in so many cities around the globe. Yet latest figures put foreign ownership at around 10% max. Let's ignore low interest rates and Canadians bidding against themselves in a hot market.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by toasterlovin on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @10:53PM (#16817616)
I also think the foreign investor thing is overblown, but it’s always the marginal demand that causes prices to go up. Take 10% of the property owners out of a market and prices will go down.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by pesfandiar on Thursday April 12, 2018 @12:58AM (#16818121)
You can say that about any non-zero share of the market; take it out and it becomes cheaper! I believe the reason we even talk about foreign investors is that the collective mind would like to attribute the mess to "them" versus "us".
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by CPLX on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:55AM (#16819553)
10% foreign ownership of a major city housing market is an extraordinarily high number that will certainly change the market dramatically.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by refurb on Thursday April 12, 2018 @12:45AM (#16818057)
Exactly! I would guess that another driver of high prices is speculation by Canadians. Low interest rates and the "real estate always goes up" mentality has created a ton of panicked buyers who are willing to extend themselves financially in order to prevent being priced out of the market forever.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by soperj on Thursday April 12, 2018 @01:34AM (#16818285)
Let's also ignore that before the foreign investor tax over 20% of purchases were being made by foreign investors in places like Langley and Richmond. That is insane when you think that these people aren't selling at the same time, and is just pure demand.
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Re:Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for... by mistermann on Thursday April 12, 2018 @08:29AM (#16820135)
Those figures are estimates. Blind trusts and proxy buyers are two ways to hide ownership.

Protest all you want, but with current available data, all the public can do is speculate, only the government has access to the data necessary to have a deeper understanding.

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