Posted on 02/15/2017 4:22:36 PM PST by Lorianne
Up until a year or two ago, Chinese could get a visa if they invested a million dollars in real estate. So they bought up single family homes, two little condos or one luxury condo - driving up real estate prices. And for a while, Vancouver welcomed people paying for condos that they didn’t live in because it brought money to the city without raising demand for infrastructure. For the Chinese, it resulted in not just an investor visa but a safe place to live and sometimes investment property, too.
It is only when it bid up real estate to the point locals screamed that politicians cared.
Investing in a nice condo is a decent investment, because it gives you a known home if you have to flee your home country and is pretty easy to sell if you decide you don’t need to leave.
Or let family vacation there and have an anchor baby if necessary.
Except that Vancouver is like SF being surrounded by mountains and ocean, so the many homes sitting empty but bought by foreign investors (who often got visas for their million dollar investment) drove up the cost for the average single family home in Vancouver to over a million.
So locals get priced out of a housing market by foreigners who don’t even live there yet and may never arrive.
The Communist Party still runs China.
The communists, every once in a while, get the hankering to imprison the wealthy.
These might just be safe houses.
Walt Disney bought a big chunk of Florida using this sort of tactic.
I’ve heard where in the USA you can get a green card by “investing” $500,000 - so they buy a house. However, I went and looked at the actual rules, and it seemed that one has to invest $500,000 into a U.S. business and have at least 10(?) Americans working there.
Stuff em’ full of Syrian refugees so those rich Trudeau supporters can experience the wonders of multi-culturalism.
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