A ‘Sold over asking’ sign is on display on a house for sale in Toronto, Ontario. Photograph: Hyungwon Kang/Reuters

About 40% of Toronto houses have no owner

Aminy Andawi
Business & Industry
Real Estate
Jul 08, 2019
2912
More cities across Canada could be facing a struggle with housing affordability as more than a third of condominiums in Toronto are owned by people who don’t live in them. According to a data released by Statistics Canada, 39.7% condos in Toronto are either rented or used as a second property.

This leads to evidence of people now view housing as an investment and not as a place to live. Based on the data from Andy Yan, the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver stated that the price of housing is much higher than the people’s income.

Vancouver ranks as the second-least affordable city in the world and only 12% of the families can afford to own a home while almost half of the condos are owned by investors. However, punitive taxation has been added to the unused property and foreign buyers.

To collect the latest data to answer questions regarding the non-resident ownership, Statistics Canada is trying another method rather than census-style surveys. Jean-Philippe Deschamps-Laporte, Statistics Canada’s chief said that Canada has the uniqueness of using administrative data. The Canadian Housing Statistics Program next goal is to get valuable information based on previous databases.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/toronto-housing-owner-occupied-canada-affordability

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