Remember this is $500 million awarded to people out competing honest Canadians looking for housing who aren't lying about their incomes.

If 10 people bid for a house, it's the guy in China lying about their income setting the house price when they win, by what HSBC is doing. This will have an outsized effect on the market.

Except HSBC knows 99/100 of the time, those bidders in PRC are actually wealthier bidders and that the irregular paperwork is perfunctory to the fact that the system has spend decades building loopholes for said wealthy PRC buyers with developed methods of capital flight, which has always made them better candidates than "honest" Canadians. Occasional fraud doesn't have outsized effect to the very real fact that there are simply more wealthy PRC buyers than Canadian ones, and sellers/bankers/ everyone who gains in the transactions wants it that way. Honest Canadians with 200k household income and 10% down can't compete against PRC buyer with millions of slightly illiquid assets. These PRC buyers are the same as rich Indian/Iranian/insert elite from other country buyers, there's just a shit load more of them and they have to jump through more hoops due to capital controls on PRC's end which Canada RE system is all too happy to ignore.

yes, remember it's capitalism doing this, not Chinese, Indian, Canadian or American.

hail free market.

This is not an inherent feature of capitalism. This is a failure of the government to create a fair market. This is caused by people that are subverting the rules to out compete the people playing by the rules.

Tell that to the capitalists always protesting that there's no need for regulations

I have seen a lot that smaller, high trust places where people worry about long term reputation, status etc are not good at competing with large immigrant populations who do not have any stake in maintaining a reputation in the community.

Capitalism doesn’t have to mean an unregulated free market. That’s one flavor of capitalism.

> capitalism is whatever I feel is bad about it > bad actors define capitalism

Sure thing bud.

It's $500m that went to "honest Canadians" selling their real estate. The house isn't gone, it's still there, and will probably get sold to Canadians when the bubble pops, possibly much cheaper.

Ahaha, the bubble popping. That'll be the day. All they're doing is increasing house prices for no reason. Houses are now just casino chips for rich people.

On the other hand if it doesn't pop, then it literally doesn't matter if the income documents were fake, as the bank has good collateral and giving the loan turned out not to be a mistake.

Now you're thinking like a bank.

Oh, and think of the tax revenue! ;)

Fraud is fraud, so it does matter. Same way that SBF is still going to jail even if the people with money in FTX get their money back (via crypto rising again / the AI investment).

The real people harmed were the Canadians trying to start a family who got outbid on the house.

NZ has this problem but with real buyers regardless. Chinese citizens evading laws as much as they can to buy houses and flip them, sometimes hours later.

Laws like "you must live in the house for 1 year before selling" meant they just sent a relative to live there free before selling for higher price.

Like investors and companies chasing ever higher profits, there's a bunch of people that think the house they own should be worth 100000% more by the time they sell it.

Even had a gen x friend be like "Well I pay rates (council services fees) while I own the property so it should be worth more!"

Bruh, getting your rubbish taken away while you live there doesn't add value to the fucking house. Otherwise I could claim paying my electricity bill while I live there does too.

It says "at least". It's also looking at specific branches of one single bank. Who knows the true extent if all banks and branches are considered.

Ya, fair enough, and some Toronto mortgages are more than a million too.