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.

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".

10% foreign ownership of a major city housing market is an extraordinarily high number that will certainly change the market dramatically.

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.

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.

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.