A tax on foreign homebuyers in Vancouver cut luxury purchases in Canada’s priciest housing market by more than half last month, according to a brokerage report. Meanwhile, high-end sales in Toronto surged.
Transactions in Vancouver of at least C$1 million ($759,000) slid 65 percent from a year earlier to 95 units in August, the month that a 15 percent transfer tax on deals by non-Canadian homebuyers took effect, according to Sotheby’s International Realty Canada. At the same time, luxury-home sales in Toronto and its suburbs doubled to 1,459 units, the high-end brokerage said.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
