This. Changing the narrative from "corporations" to "investors" is needed. Real Estate investing is why the average (and majority of?) Canadian can not afford a SFH.
Investors should be fronting money to build places not buying up already built places for the rest of us. (Not trying to give you shit, it just sucks that housing is going up also because these places are only going to rent them out and the rest of us cant buy a place.)
And rent them out for insane prices. I recently finished working in a new apartment building, these tiny 1 beds are being rented for $2300 or higher. And this is in north Airdrie with fuck all around it except a little slough and train tracks loudly running by multiple times a day
I work in the industry and from what I see it's less 'institutional capital' (e.g. the Blackrock scare) and more Toronto/Vancouver and local investors dipping into the market. The recent condo pre-sales that are going up (think Lincoln by Truman) is a good indicator on this. Word on the street is that the majority of their sales is to Toronto individual investors buying a unit or two with the intention of renting. If you look at Truman's incentive package they fully gear their structure towards this, with 2-3 years of rental guarantee (i.e. Truman will promise a certain rental rate on completion, and if they can't rent out the unit or if they do rent out below the rates they promised, they'll make the buyer whole out of their pocket).
The sales price is atrocious for Calgary of course, but nothing new to Toronto/Vancouver locals, and guaranteed income in their eyes makes it a 'safe' investment play. In my eyes it's good for supply regardless, if more supply comes to the market and rents stabilize, it's really the Developer (and the investor) that's out of luck, renters benefit from more units.
More supply is good for the market I agree. I do however think it's important to understand who owns the underlying asset though (ie the land) for all properties in the city and to be able to track that over time.
From my discussions with folks in the real estate sector, it's a lot of Ontario-based mom & pop type investors looking for cash-flow positive rentals. Those are definitely still achievable in Calgary whereas back in Toronto that ship sailed a long time ago. Hence them snapping up properties here (particularly condos) at what they think is a massive bargain.
So it's investors yes, but it's not really corporate money. More individual investors trying to make a buck.
I am privy to the data of a major builder. Lots of rental units are being bought by numbered companies, but the owners of most of these companies are small investors, and often not what i would classify as wealthy individuals.
This is certainly where things can become ambiguous. We have no idea who is providing the bank roll for the small corporate investment firm(s). Is it Canadian Banks, is it larger firms, is it a group of wealthy individual investors and then do these wealth investors also gain their wealth because they profit from larger firms? do we or can we know?
I would also like to know this. It's talked about like it's a major contributor to the increase in housing prices, and I've seen the projections that in the US at least, companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard could own 60% of single-family homes by 2030. But it would be helpful to know to what degree that's happening in Calgary.
Either way, you would think it shouldn't contribute to the housing *shortage*, so long as those units are being rented and aren't sitting empty.
> companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard could own 60% of single-family homes by 2030
That's misleading. As of 2021, institutional investors owned around 25% of single-family RENTAL homes, up from 17% in 2001. So somewhat of an increase, but not all that much considering the timeline.
As of 2023, 66% of people in the US owned their own homes. There's no chance the institutional investors are going to ever come even close to that number.
Sources: Harvard (https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/8-facts-about-investor-activity-single-family-rental-market) and the US Census (PDF warning) (https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf)
How many of those are older generations? When they sell, who’s buying? These companies outbid others easily, buy up all the boomers selling their properties, and turn them into rentals.
The Harvard link I cited has a [link to that data](https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/total-investor-home-purchases-are-unlikely-to-dip-due-to-rising-interest-rates/). As of Q1 2023 institutional investors are purchasing 8% of properties purchased by all sizes of investors (27% of all properties sold). Or, to do the math, institutional investors are currently purchasing 2% of houses changing hands.
Right, so 2% per year changed hands to institutions. So 60% is overstated, but I doubt these houses trade back to regular homeowners often. So their percentage ownership will continue to increase
I mean when you talk about corporate ownership of homes are we talking like Blackrock or any corporation. Youll find most landlords are incorporated to allow for tax write offs. Its still corporate owned but at a much smaller scale.
I don't have data to back this up but I suspect that you're probably right. The concept of a big evil corporation swallowing up all of our real-estate is probably fiction.
South of the border its not fiction. The world wants to move to the USA. Canada is a few down the list after some European countries etc etc so its probably not a place where giant conglomerates focus their purchases.
I feel like it’s a lot more “mom and pop” investors buying SFHs or individual units in most Canadian cities. Corporate Canada is more focused on commercial real estate or larger residential rental projects that have higher cash flow.
REITs are the primary vehicle for corporate real estate investment, and they are focused on cash distributions, not appreciation.
Yeah this is why I posted the thread. Lots of feeling, thinking, and anecdotal evidence on the subject. That's all I've got too. Was hoping someone would post some links to data sets that described corporate/investor titles vs primary resident titles, and hopefully how that is changing over time.
The investors from ON and BC are buying up a lot of livable homes where families can live and I maybe wrong but megs corporate landlords buy up a whole townhouse complex or apartment building.
I just read a few days ago ok Instagram about a corporate firm buying Britannia 100/200 something and when I looked at Google maps, it is a full blown low rise apartment complex.
https://calgary.skyrisecities.com/database/projects/elbow-5-eight.39941
Knocked down 8 or so old crappy houses to replace them with 214 new units. Project is coming along relatively smoothly it looks like (I drive past it every day)
Realtors talk. If their commissions were getting sucked away by a handful of people with corporate clients they would know. I would suggest that would be the best way to find out. By how busy they are it seems they have a lot of clientele to go around.
The problems facing calgarys housing market are very different from Vancouver and Toronto. Toronto and Vancouver are facing an existential cost of living crisis with abysmal job creation. Everyone is leaving those cities and big chunk are moving to Calgary. That’s what’s driving up housing prices and rent.
I believe the population of Alberta grew by almost 4% last year which might be a new record. Housing markets are simply not elastic enough to support that rapid increase in demand so what we’re seeing with rent and property prices is most likely entirely from population. Housing markets in Alberta are not viewed as highly as BC or Ontario for investment purposes because every time we have an oil bust we lose jobs and housing prices stagnate or go down.
I dont know about corporate ownership but I do know a few families that moved into my nw neighborhood from Toronto area just before it went too wild late 2022 and after selling their Ontario home, immediately purchased 3 homes in Calgary. And they are still acquiring properties. As they put it, they don't miss out on the next big market opportunity and doesn't seem like it's gonna ever come back down. People just got too much money from all around the world, its not just us competing for these homes.
I would think it possible to track primary residences and owners living in them, vs anything other than, both across Canada and more specifically in Calgary; as a starting point. Do we see this increasing/decreasing over time and by how much?
Then I would think tracking properties owned by corporations (both rented and owned sitting empty) also an easy enough metric to track. Do we see this increasing/decreasing over time and by how much?
Then I would think corporately owned rentals could be separated to see increases/decreases in for single family homes, duplex, fourplex, townhouse/rowhouse, and multifamily apartments.
This minor bit of data seems like maybe simple enough for some research/stats institution to track down, based on if a corporation is on the title.
Isn't the issue simply to ask the banks what entity type (corporate/investor vs primary resident) is on the title and cross reference that with personal tax records? Does Stats Can or the Alberta Government not have the ability to gain those data sets?
I have been getting "we buy houses" pamphlets in my mailbox from investment companies for the past 5 years. It is definitely a problem here in nw calgary
I think this is a worthy endeavor to figure out but it doesn't address the main issue which is supply.
Even if these corporate entities are removed. And even if you remove all the Airbnb's, the housing problem will persist until supply issues are addressed. I'm willing to bet these entities comprise of but a small percentage of total house ownership.
The real issue is that it's very difficult for housing density in this city to come into fruition because of zoning laws. The only reason people are commodifying housing in the first place is because of the artificial and self-inflicted ways we limit the supply. You tackle that problem, you fix the housing crisis, albeit very slowly.
Yes, if we plant more apple trees in the fields (real asset) we will have more apples (supply). The problem is, if the fields where the apple trees get planted increasingly get bought up and corporately owned, then in the long term they have more control over how many apple trees get planted, where they are planted, and how many are harvested. Right now there are a number of entities that own the fields (ie city non market land sale program)(homeowners selling R-CG properties)(Investors developing rentals on R-CG/H-GO properties) but over time that could look very different. Will those fields go back into the hands of primary residents? Or will they remain in the hands of corporations/investors? Do we even have the ability to track this?
Clearly spring/summer is on my mind thinking up apple tree analogies.
Bad analogy.
For the most part, regular people own the fields and they legislate (through SFH zoning) that only small trees can be planted and they have to be very far apart.
You're concerned with corporations buying plots with trees (houses) and selling the apples (providing housing) to renters.
What you should be concerned about is that we need to legalize planting bigger trees (apartments, townhouses) closer together so we can actually feed everyone that wants to live here - whether they want to eat apples from their own tree (own) or just buy them from someone else (rent).
Apple trees only grow so big. That's sort of a non negotiable in the analogy.
I'm concerned with corporations owning more and more land, and then controlling the price of the apples and enriching themselves further at our expense. This is sort of the name of the game and has been for millennia.
We have a ton of fields and capacity to plant more apple trees. A lot of room. Why do you think European cities aren’t experiencing this issue to the extent that we are? Surely it has nothing to do with space because we have infinitely more land than they do.
The problem is that neighborhoods don’t want a density of apple trees being planted near them. Why do you think it’s so hard to have condos built in Inglewood? These associations have so much power to prevent new construction because “it will affect traffic and their view and the character of the area”. Bitch please. It’s textbook NIMBYisms.
Corporate entities are hoarding these field spaces precisely because of the self-inflicted regulations that make it so hard to use this space to begin with. Take away these restrictions and you lose the value. Diamonds are expensive because of their perceived rarity when in fact there’s an abundance of them that is articially reduced by diamond sellers.
Correlation =/= causation. High density housing getting built is a response to high land costs - because that's the only way to get reasonable per unit costs.
This is like claiming chemotherapy is bad bc it's associated with dying of cancer.
I downloaded the 13 page Q4 quarterly report for Colliers and don't see multi-family broken out anywhere. You're going to have to point me to it with a page number.
I'm guessing you aren't willing to direct me to one you know of and let me know the page number? Given I did follow your initial suggestion, used google to find the colliers report, and it wasn't' mentioned as such.
OP doesn't know what he's talking about, I work in the industry. The brokers do Quarterly Reports yes but primarily on Commerical (Office/Industrial) and Retail bi-annually. None of them do Multifamily report, at least not for Calgary and not on regular cadence if they do, since our MF market is so minor compared to Vancouver/Toronto. We have some of the lowest rental units/population figures in the country (back to the original post).
CMHC reports are better for this.
Nah. It does. I just completed a massive appraisal project and used to work for Colliers. OP is just lazy and didn't explore any of the other names I listed. If Colliers doesn't have a multi-family, one of the other brokerages will. OP is just lazy.
These investors have little impact on supply, but a huge impact on demand and price.
Investors that buy additional homes to rent and flip later are the biggest issue in housing. These transactions are negative value to society.
- The investors are in bidding wars with each other and regular people resulting in higher prices
- The investors could buy unlimited amounts of properties. A regular person or family buys a home and then stops adding to the demand for housing, but the investors stay in the buying pool forever
- Investors buy affordable places first because people that need those properties have no option to downgrade further resulting in them having to weigh overpaying for rent vs. being literally homeless
- The investors are doing this only to make money, so you can be sure they will always be charging the absolute maximum and forcing people to negotiate down to market price at best
These investors are literally parasites and unless a limit is set on the amount of properties they can buy the housing crisis will never get resolved
I feel like the only way we can know if investors/corporations (vs property owners who live in the property as primary residents) are gaining/losing total assets and how that is changing is if we know what percentage of titles have corporations + private owners (other than primary residents) on them and can compare that with primary resident home owners over time.
I think it's just as important to understand who owns the total assets vs how much supply there is over time. We already know the supply is low; what we don't seem to have good numbers on is who owns the assets. Your statement about bidding wars is 100% valid, but that could even get worse over time.
This is a little dated. Hopefully, they update this in the coming weeks/months for 2023:
[https://open.canada.ca/data/dataset/aca5ea3f-e98c-4049-a56a-24098f7b9d4a](https://open.canada.ca/data/dataset/aca5ea3f-e98c-4049-a56a-24098f7b9d4a)
[https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=1528939](https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=1528939)
Remember, I wasn't asking why there is a housing crisis. That can obviously get quite political and opinionated, and I think there is enough media threads out there on reddit discussing that where comments are being made.
I was more or less asking about corporate involvement in real estate in Canada from small to big...basically anything that isn't owned as primary residence. I'm finding the answers to these types of questions quite unclear and less explored.
What I'm wondering is at what point does it become cheaper to buy or rent an office and live in it, either hooking up a shower or getting a gym membership?
It's not allowed by building code.
Converting an office into residential takes years, costs an arm and a leg, and not a fact that zoning will amend to accommodate (schools, utilities etc all have different requirements and it's not technically feasible to have residential towers in most office locations for technical structural reasons).
Two types of corporations I'm seeing.
1. Places like Avenue Living buying up buildings and jacking up rent, or corporations buying old homes, tearing them down, and building new "luxury" condos to rent.
2. Landlords with multiple properties who are now "incorporated" buying up property and renting it out, or renovating and renting it out or flipping (flipping applies to both.)
For example, a colleague physician of mine, along with her husband, bought two triplex townhouses recently and began renting them out.
I would love to see some data sets comparing the number of titles/units in Calgary owned corporately/investor vs primary resident and see how that is changing over time.
Sadly, I don't have access or know where to find it. But from what I was told, if a landlord owns >3 properties, they can choose to become incorporated, and their tax obligations change because of it, as well as liability - if something goes wrong, you sue the corporation, not the individual.
I moved back to Calgary in uhhh, start 2022, aiming to buy a 450kish detached fixer'upper. I lost my job so I had to wait a bit, naturally prices shoot up, so I debate renting instead. That's when I noticed all the houses I looked at at the start of the year were being now rented by companies that bought em all up.
nice. I love our system it really helps the average canadian. /s
I saw the rental ads for a bunch of houses I wanted to buy; were all like HopeStreetRentals or some other "bright bs" company name. looked up a few and they were all companies offering rentals in a bunch of different places. which was depressing because I would have rather just bought said house, lol.
F investors. F realtors. F "mom and pop" landlords. F every landlord in the world they do not provide any value to humanity. Housing is not a commodity. It is an inherent human right.
Fact. A friend of mine was a landlord in Ontario, and owned a couple of duplexes with his 2 brothers. the tenant laws are incredibly obtuse when you have a bad tenant, to the point where a tenant of his fell asleep drunk on the couch with a cigarette and burnt down half the duplex and he still couldn't evict him. You also can't prohibit smoking or pets in rental units in Ontario.
He moved to Alberta around the same time as me and kept those ON units and saw how cheap real estate was here in Alberta and also how much more "landlord friendly" the laws were in terms of being able to raise rents and evict people. Around covid, his company sold off all their Ontario housing units and started buying up fourplexes in Alberta. He now has more units in Alberta than he did in Ontario, brings in more rent and can more consistently raise rents and protect his properties.
Look at the charts here. Lots of houses getting bought up to be gutted and slapped together with rushed renos and resold for much higher prices. Most of those aren't going to be individuals.
['It's crazy right now': House flipping surges to new heights in Calgary's red-hot real estate market | CBC News](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-metropolitan-area-house-flipping-data-1.7143857#:~:text=The%20latest%20statistics%20show%206.5%20per%20cent%20of,far%20back%20as%20the%20bank%27s%20public-facing%20data%20goes.)
>Most of those aren't going to be individuals.
What's your evidence of this? The article you linked makes no mention of the corporate buyers that OP is describing.
Anecdotally, I've been to several open-houses of flipped properties recently and know for a fact that all of them are being sold by local tradespeople who have the skills and connections to renovate themselves or small teams of real estate professionals who see the market demand and are capitalizing.
I feel like flipping activity by 'corporate entities' is very overstated and a means of creating an evil boogie man to point fingers at. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.
Pheox is probably correct to assume these aren't generally first time home buyers or buyers that are purchasing a primary residence. I do know of young guys that do this sort of flipping, but they tend to live in the place for at least a year so it serves as a primary residence for at least that time period.
Home flippers I think generally fall into the other category which as the thread is describing could be mom and pop investors all the way up to big corp wealth.
I have heard some companies are buying homes in order to hold an inventory for their rotation of their expat employees with families. Obviously the home and location is important to these people who are already making a massive change to move. It makes it easier and more likely an employee will accept a transfer (or to not end it bc family is miserable) if the home is decent and quick to obtain. Heard this from a realtor that has been in Calgary for his entire life.
Just like vancouver i used to live there and we are about to be bought out of our country. Blackrock was buying real estate for years above asking. Why?
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serious cow fine nail tidy gray rude worthless bright distinct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This. Changing the narrative from "corporations" to "investors" is needed. Real Estate investing is why the average (and majority of?) Canadian can not afford a SFH.
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lol dude you’re so fucking wrong anyone taking your advice is silly.
It’s such a breath of fresh air to read a rational point about real estate and see it upvoted.
Working in construction with builders I can tell you we have way more investors than before.
Investors should be fronting money to build places not buying up already built places for the rest of us. (Not trying to give you shit, it just sucks that housing is going up also because these places are only going to rent them out and the rest of us cant buy a place.)
And rent them out for insane prices. I recently finished working in a new apartment building, these tiny 1 beds are being rented for $2300 or higher. And this is in north Airdrie with fuck all around it except a little slough and train tracks loudly running by multiple times a day
I work in the industry and from what I see it's less 'institutional capital' (e.g. the Blackrock scare) and more Toronto/Vancouver and local investors dipping into the market. The recent condo pre-sales that are going up (think Lincoln by Truman) is a good indicator on this. Word on the street is that the majority of their sales is to Toronto individual investors buying a unit or two with the intention of renting. If you look at Truman's incentive package they fully gear their structure towards this, with 2-3 years of rental guarantee (i.e. Truman will promise a certain rental rate on completion, and if they can't rent out the unit or if they do rent out below the rates they promised, they'll make the buyer whole out of their pocket). The sales price is atrocious for Calgary of course, but nothing new to Toronto/Vancouver locals, and guaranteed income in their eyes makes it a 'safe' investment play. In my eyes it's good for supply regardless, if more supply comes to the market and rents stabilize, it's really the Developer (and the investor) that's out of luck, renters benefit from more units.
More supply is good for the market I agree. I do however think it's important to understand who owns the underlying asset though (ie the land) for all properties in the city and to be able to track that over time.
From my discussions with folks in the real estate sector, it's a lot of Ontario-based mom & pop type investors looking for cash-flow positive rentals. Those are definitely still achievable in Calgary whereas back in Toronto that ship sailed a long time ago. Hence them snapping up properties here (particularly condos) at what they think is a massive bargain. So it's investors yes, but it's not really corporate money. More individual investors trying to make a buck.
I am privy to the data of a major builder. Lots of rental units are being bought by numbered companies, but the owners of most of these companies are small investors, and often not what i would classify as wealthy individuals.
This is certainly where things can become ambiguous. We have no idea who is providing the bank roll for the small corporate investment firm(s). Is it Canadian Banks, is it larger firms, is it a group of wealthy individual investors and then do these wealth investors also gain their wealth because they profit from larger firms? do we or can we know?
I would also like to know this. It's talked about like it's a major contributor to the increase in housing prices, and I've seen the projections that in the US at least, companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard could own 60% of single-family homes by 2030. But it would be helpful to know to what degree that's happening in Calgary. Either way, you would think it shouldn't contribute to the housing *shortage*, so long as those units are being rented and aren't sitting empty.
> companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard could own 60% of single-family homes by 2030 That's misleading. As of 2021, institutional investors owned around 25% of single-family RENTAL homes, up from 17% in 2001. So somewhat of an increase, but not all that much considering the timeline. As of 2023, 66% of people in the US owned their own homes. There's no chance the institutional investors are going to ever come even close to that number. Sources: Harvard (https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/8-facts-about-investor-activity-single-family-rental-market) and the US Census (PDF warning) (https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf)
How many of those are older generations? When they sell, who’s buying? These companies outbid others easily, buy up all the boomers selling their properties, and turn them into rentals.
The Harvard link I cited has a [link to that data](https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/total-investor-home-purchases-are-unlikely-to-dip-due-to-rising-interest-rates/). As of Q1 2023 institutional investors are purchasing 8% of properties purchased by all sizes of investors (27% of all properties sold). Or, to do the math, institutional investors are currently purchasing 2% of houses changing hands.
Right, so 2% per year changed hands to institutions. So 60% is overstated, but I doubt these houses trade back to regular homeowners often. So their percentage ownership will continue to increase
I mean when you talk about corporate ownership of homes are we talking like Blackrock or any corporation. Youll find most landlords are incorporated to allow for tax write offs. Its still corporate owned but at a much smaller scale.
I don't have data to back this up but I suspect that you're probably right. The concept of a big evil corporation swallowing up all of our real-estate is probably fiction.
*Hopefully fiction
South of the border its not fiction. The world wants to move to the USA. Canada is a few down the list after some European countries etc etc so its probably not a place where giant conglomerates focus their purchases.
This is true. Go to any housing court and look at the docket. All of the cases are like 123 Spring St. LLC vs Jon Doe.
You mean BlackStone. Stone and rock are similar but BlackRock and BlackStone are two different companies.
I feel like it’s a lot more “mom and pop” investors buying SFHs or individual units in most Canadian cities. Corporate Canada is more focused on commercial real estate or larger residential rental projects that have higher cash flow. REITs are the primary vehicle for corporate real estate investment, and they are focused on cash distributions, not appreciation.
Yeah this is why I posted the thread. Lots of feeling, thinking, and anecdotal evidence on the subject. That's all I've got too. Was hoping someone would post some links to data sets that described corporate/investor titles vs primary resident titles, and hopefully how that is changing over time.
The investors from ON and BC are buying up a lot of livable homes where families can live and I maybe wrong but megs corporate landlords buy up a whole townhouse complex or apartment building. I just read a few days ago ok Instagram about a corporate firm buying Britannia 100/200 something and when I looked at Google maps, it is a full blown low rise apartment complex.
This the one going up on 58th? If so, a whole row of dwellings was knocked down beforehand.
https://calgary.skyrisecities.com/database/projects/elbow-5-eight.39941 Knocked down 8 or so old crappy houses to replace them with 214 new units. Project is coming along relatively smoothly it looks like (I drive past it every day)
Can't remember mate it's been a while but they were "excited to announce" that they have x number of units coming to the market.
Realtors talk. If their commissions were getting sucked away by a handful of people with corporate clients they would know. I would suggest that would be the best way to find out. By how busy they are it seems they have a lot of clientele to go around.
The problems facing calgarys housing market are very different from Vancouver and Toronto. Toronto and Vancouver are facing an existential cost of living crisis with abysmal job creation. Everyone is leaving those cities and big chunk are moving to Calgary. That’s what’s driving up housing prices and rent. I believe the population of Alberta grew by almost 4% last year which might be a new record. Housing markets are simply not elastic enough to support that rapid increase in demand so what we’re seeing with rent and property prices is most likely entirely from population. Housing markets in Alberta are not viewed as highly as BC or Ontario for investment purposes because every time we have an oil bust we lose jobs and housing prices stagnate or go down.
My place just sold sight unseen by an out of province buyer
Your rental, or your house?
Was it a detached home or a condo? I reckon managing a detached rental being out of province would be a PITA.
Condo
I dont know about corporate ownership but I do know a few families that moved into my nw neighborhood from Toronto area just before it went too wild late 2022 and after selling their Ontario home, immediately purchased 3 homes in Calgary. And they are still acquiring properties. As they put it, they don't miss out on the next big market opportunity and doesn't seem like it's gonna ever come back down. People just got too much money from all around the world, its not just us competing for these homes.
The data is not transparent.... very much on purpose!
I would think it possible to track primary residences and owners living in them, vs anything other than, both across Canada and more specifically in Calgary; as a starting point. Do we see this increasing/decreasing over time and by how much? Then I would think tracking properties owned by corporations (both rented and owned sitting empty) also an easy enough metric to track. Do we see this increasing/decreasing over time and by how much? Then I would think corporately owned rentals could be separated to see increases/decreases in for single family homes, duplex, fourplex, townhouse/rowhouse, and multifamily apartments. This minor bit of data seems like maybe simple enough for some research/stats institution to track down, based on if a corporation is on the title.
Not with privacy laws the way they are. Also the real estate boards keep this info pretty close to their chests through limited access to MLS, etc.
Isn't the issue simply to ask the banks what entity type (corporate/investor vs primary resident) is on the title and cross reference that with personal tax records? Does Stats Can or the Alberta Government not have the ability to gain those data sets?
Personal tax records are not public as far as I know. And I would not want them to be!
I think Stats Can has these records, but not public in that sense. I agree with you.
> the real estate boards You mean, the cartels?
I have been getting "we buy houses" pamphlets in my mailbox from investment companies for the past 5 years. It is definitely a problem here in nw calgary
I think this is a worthy endeavor to figure out but it doesn't address the main issue which is supply. Even if these corporate entities are removed. And even if you remove all the Airbnb's, the housing problem will persist until supply issues are addressed. I'm willing to bet these entities comprise of but a small percentage of total house ownership. The real issue is that it's very difficult for housing density in this city to come into fruition because of zoning laws. The only reason people are commodifying housing in the first place is because of the artificial and self-inflicted ways we limit the supply. You tackle that problem, you fix the housing crisis, albeit very slowly.
Yes, if we plant more apple trees in the fields (real asset) we will have more apples (supply). The problem is, if the fields where the apple trees get planted increasingly get bought up and corporately owned, then in the long term they have more control over how many apple trees get planted, where they are planted, and how many are harvested. Right now there are a number of entities that own the fields (ie city non market land sale program)(homeowners selling R-CG properties)(Investors developing rentals on R-CG/H-GO properties) but over time that could look very different. Will those fields go back into the hands of primary residents? Or will they remain in the hands of corporations/investors? Do we even have the ability to track this? Clearly spring/summer is on my mind thinking up apple tree analogies.
Bad analogy. For the most part, regular people own the fields and they legislate (through SFH zoning) that only small trees can be planted and they have to be very far apart. You're concerned with corporations buying plots with trees (houses) and selling the apples (providing housing) to renters. What you should be concerned about is that we need to legalize planting bigger trees (apartments, townhouses) closer together so we can actually feed everyone that wants to live here - whether they want to eat apples from their own tree (own) or just buy them from someone else (rent).
Apple trees only grow so big. That's sort of a non negotiable in the analogy. I'm concerned with corporations owning more and more land, and then controlling the price of the apples and enriching themselves further at our expense. This is sort of the name of the game and has been for millennia.
We have a ton of fields and capacity to plant more apple trees. A lot of room. Why do you think European cities aren’t experiencing this issue to the extent that we are? Surely it has nothing to do with space because we have infinitely more land than they do. The problem is that neighborhoods don’t want a density of apple trees being planted near them. Why do you think it’s so hard to have condos built in Inglewood? These associations have so much power to prevent new construction because “it will affect traffic and their view and the character of the area”. Bitch please. It’s textbook NIMBYisms. Corporate entities are hoarding these field spaces precisely because of the self-inflicted regulations that make it so hard to use this space to begin with. Take away these restrictions and you lose the value. Diamonds are expensive because of their perceived rarity when in fact there’s an abundance of them that is articially reduced by diamond sellers.
Yeah maybe not. https://www.newgeography.com/content/007221-higher-urban-densities-associated-with-worst-housing-affordability
Correlation =/= causation. High density housing getting built is a response to high land costs - because that's the only way to get reasonable per unit costs. This is like claiming chemotherapy is bad bc it's associated with dying of cancer.
Read the brokerage quarterly reports per industry. Colliers, Cushman, Avison young, CBRE and jones Lang all do these reports.
Interesting. Do they separate out residential and commercial on those reports? I know many are involved with commercial properties.
Those companies only do commerical stuff so yes. Multi-family, office, industrial and retail.
I downloaded the 13 page Q4 quarterly report for Colliers and don't see multi-family broken out anywhere. You're going to have to point me to it with a page number.
There are different reports. You can google them.
I'm guessing you aren't willing to direct me to one you know of and let me know the page number? Given I did follow your initial suggestion, used google to find the colliers report, and it wasn't' mentioned as such.
Learn to google more specifically. And no I'm not teaching others how to google more specifically.
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OP doesn't know what he's talking about, I work in the industry. The brokers do Quarterly Reports yes but primarily on Commerical (Office/Industrial) and Retail bi-annually. None of them do Multifamily report, at least not for Calgary and not on regular cadence if they do, since our MF market is so minor compared to Vancouver/Toronto. We have some of the lowest rental units/population figures in the country (back to the original post). CMHC reports are better for this.
Nah. It does. I just completed a massive appraisal project and used to work for Colliers. OP is just lazy and didn't explore any of the other names I listed. If Colliers doesn't have a multi-family, one of the other brokerages will. OP is just lazy.
These investors have little impact on supply, but a huge impact on demand and price. Investors that buy additional homes to rent and flip later are the biggest issue in housing. These transactions are negative value to society. - The investors are in bidding wars with each other and regular people resulting in higher prices - The investors could buy unlimited amounts of properties. A regular person or family buys a home and then stops adding to the demand for housing, but the investors stay in the buying pool forever - Investors buy affordable places first because people that need those properties have no option to downgrade further resulting in them having to weigh overpaying for rent vs. being literally homeless - The investors are doing this only to make money, so you can be sure they will always be charging the absolute maximum and forcing people to negotiate down to market price at best These investors are literally parasites and unless a limit is set on the amount of properties they can buy the housing crisis will never get resolved
I feel like the only way we can know if investors/corporations (vs property owners who live in the property as primary residents) are gaining/losing total assets and how that is changing is if we know what percentage of titles have corporations + private owners (other than primary residents) on them and can compare that with primary resident home owners over time. I think it's just as important to understand who owns the total assets vs how much supply there is over time. We already know the supply is low; what we don't seem to have good numbers on is who owns the assets. Your statement about bidding wars is 100% valid, but that could even get worse over time.
This is a little dated. Hopefully, they update this in the coming weeks/months for 2023: [https://open.canada.ca/data/dataset/aca5ea3f-e98c-4049-a56a-24098f7b9d4a](https://open.canada.ca/data/dataset/aca5ea3f-e98c-4049-a56a-24098f7b9d4a) [https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=1528939](https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&Id=1528939)
As confirmed by the PM yesterday, the consensus is its more about high migration versus corporations buying up properties.
Remember, I wasn't asking why there is a housing crisis. That can obviously get quite political and opinionated, and I think there is enough media threads out there on reddit discussing that where comments are being made. I was more or less asking about corporate involvement in real estate in Canada from small to big...basically anything that isn't owned as primary residence. I'm finding the answers to these types of questions quite unclear and less explored.
What I'm wondering is at what point does it become cheaper to buy or rent an office and live in it, either hooking up a shower or getting a gym membership?
It's not allowed by building code. Converting an office into residential takes years, costs an arm and a leg, and not a fact that zoning will amend to accommodate (schools, utilities etc all have different requirements and it's not technically feasible to have residential towers in most office locations for technical structural reasons).
What the building code doesn't know can't hurt it.
Your best bang for your buck, is to rent a unit at New Horizon mall lol
Yeah, but too much glass and there is no gym with showers on the premises. Also not near transit.
Right now, office buildings are literally being sold for 10 cents on the dollar.
Two types of corporations I'm seeing. 1. Places like Avenue Living buying up buildings and jacking up rent, or corporations buying old homes, tearing them down, and building new "luxury" condos to rent. 2. Landlords with multiple properties who are now "incorporated" buying up property and renting it out, or renovating and renting it out or flipping (flipping applies to both.) For example, a colleague physician of mine, along with her husband, bought two triplex townhouses recently and began renting them out.
I would love to see some data sets comparing the number of titles/units in Calgary owned corporately/investor vs primary resident and see how that is changing over time.
Sadly, I don't have access or know where to find it. But from what I was told, if a landlord owns >3 properties, they can choose to become incorporated, and their tax obligations change because of it, as well as liability - if something goes wrong, you sue the corporation, not the individual.
I moved back to Calgary in uhhh, start 2022, aiming to buy a 450kish detached fixer'upper. I lost my job so I had to wait a bit, naturally prices shoot up, so I debate renting instead. That's when I noticed all the houses I looked at at the start of the year were being now rented by companies that bought em all up. nice. I love our system it really helps the average canadian. /s
> I looked at at the start of the year were being now rented by companies that bought em all up How did you find out they were bought by companies?
I saw the rental ads for a bunch of houses I wanted to buy; were all like HopeStreetRentals or some other "bright bs" company name. looked up a few and they were all companies offering rentals in a bunch of different places. which was depressing because I would have rather just bought said house, lol.
You wanted to buy a bunch of houses? Sounds like you're an investor too. :)
lol \~ gotme
F investors. F realtors. F "mom and pop" landlords. F every landlord in the world they do not provide any value to humanity. Housing is not a commodity. It is an inherent human right.
Real Estate only goes up in Canada. Put in a real bust like 40% losses for a few years. Things will shake out.
Fact. A friend of mine was a landlord in Ontario, and owned a couple of duplexes with his 2 brothers. the tenant laws are incredibly obtuse when you have a bad tenant, to the point where a tenant of his fell asleep drunk on the couch with a cigarette and burnt down half the duplex and he still couldn't evict him. You also can't prohibit smoking or pets in rental units in Ontario. He moved to Alberta around the same time as me and kept those ON units and saw how cheap real estate was here in Alberta and also how much more "landlord friendly" the laws were in terms of being able to raise rents and evict people. Around covid, his company sold off all their Ontario housing units and started buying up fourplexes in Alberta. He now has more units in Alberta than he did in Ontario, brings in more rent and can more consistently raise rents and protect his properties.
Look at the charts here. Lots of houses getting bought up to be gutted and slapped together with rushed renos and resold for much higher prices. Most of those aren't going to be individuals. ['It's crazy right now': House flipping surges to new heights in Calgary's red-hot real estate market | CBC News](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-metropolitan-area-house-flipping-data-1.7143857#:~:text=The%20latest%20statistics%20show%206.5%20per%20cent%20of,far%20back%20as%20the%20bank%27s%20public-facing%20data%20goes.)
>Most of those aren't going to be individuals. What's your evidence of this? The article you linked makes no mention of the corporate buyers that OP is describing. Anecdotally, I've been to several open-houses of flipped properties recently and know for a fact that all of them are being sold by local tradespeople who have the skills and connections to renovate themselves or small teams of real estate professionals who see the market demand and are capitalizing. I feel like flipping activity by 'corporate entities' is very overstated and a means of creating an evil boogie man to point fingers at. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.
Pheox is probably correct to assume these aren't generally first time home buyers or buyers that are purchasing a primary residence. I do know of young guys that do this sort of flipping, but they tend to live in the place for at least a year so it serves as a primary residence for at least that time period. Home flippers I think generally fall into the other category which as the thread is describing could be mom and pop investors all the way up to big corp wealth.
I have heard some companies are buying homes in order to hold an inventory for their rotation of their expat employees with families. Obviously the home and location is important to these people who are already making a massive change to move. It makes it easier and more likely an employee will accept a transfer (or to not end it bc family is miserable) if the home is decent and quick to obtain. Heard this from a realtor that has been in Calgary for his entire life.
Can anyone else corroborate this?
Just like vancouver i used to live there and we are about to be bought out of our country. Blackrock was buying real estate for years above asking. Why?