B.C. developers urge ease to Canada's foreign buyer's ban to revive housing projects | Daily Hive

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Canada's housing crisis is so bad the foreign homebuyers' ban has just been extended

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Christine Boyle appointed as the new B.C. minister of housing and municipal affairs

According to the letter, new housing starts in B.C. fell by 50 per cent between March 2024 and March 2025, plunging from 4,867 to 2,379 units. Year-to-date condo and multi-family housing starts are down 22 per cent in B.C. and 29 per cent in Ontario.

Within Metro Vancouver, some major condominium projects and developers have been going under receivership due to the challenges with meeting pre-sale targets, with the most recent notable example being the issues with the 60-storey The Curv tower in downtown Vancouver, which would have achieved 357 strata market ownership condominium homes and 176 secured purpose-built market rental homes.

There have also been layoffs at some of B.C.’s largest real estate development and marketing firms.

“Housing projects across the country are being cancelled or delayed because they are no longer viable. Moreover, we are delivering housing at a cost that people cannot afford to purchase. I will say it again — this is a cost-of-deliver crisis,” wrote Beau Jarvis, the president and CEO of Wesgroup Properties, in an announcement last month on challenging layoffs at his company. It should be noted that Wesgroup is not among the list of signatories for the letter.

Developers warn that if these trends continue, the long-term supply of homes will fall further behind demand, worsening affordability instead of improving it, with the impacts on housing supply and affordability felt years from now — given that projects take years to design, plan, receive permitting, market, and build.

“New condo development requires pre-sales to meet financing thresholds, part of which relies on investor-focused buyers,” reads the new letter to government officials shared with Daily Hive Urbanized this morning, referring to the minimum number of homes that must be sold in pre-sale for developers to access construction financing.

The industry leaders point to Australia’s 2025 housing reforms as a potential model for Canada, allowing foreign investment in newly constructed homes and pre-sales while continuing to restrict foreign purchases of existing homes. New Zealand also has similar exemptions.

They argue that similar adjustments in Canada could result in a “revitalization” of the real estate and construction activity, while maintaining protections for local buyers.

“Our direct request to government is simply this: the new home construction industry is vital to the BC economy, and the national foreign buyer ban and provincial foreign buyer tax need to be reconsidered, or modified along the lines of the Australian model,” reads the letter.

“With coordinated action between federal and provincial governments, similar measures could meaningfully accelerate housing starts, address structural challenges in the building industry, thus improving long-term affordability for British Columbians. These strategies merit serious consideration at both levels of government.”

Under the federal government’s Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non‑Canadians Act, enacted since January 2023, most non‑Canadian individuals and non‑Canadian-controlled entities cannot purchase residential property in Canada (up to three dwelling units) in Census Metropolitan Areas and Agglomerations. The ban is set to expire in January  2027, following a two‑year extension announced in February  2024.

The coalition is urging the federal government to take action in a timely manner, well before the 2027 expiration of the ban.

In March 2023, under pressure from the industry and other stakeholders, the federal government eased parts of its foreign homebuyer ban to address unintended impacts. The changes allowed temporary residents on valid work permits to buy one property, lifted restrictions on purchasing vacant land, raised the foreign ownership threshold in Canadian companies from three per cent to 10 per cent, and permitted non‑Canadians to buy property for genuine development purposes, while maintaining overall limits on speculative foreign investment.

This is further compounded by the B.C. government’s foreign buyers’ tax since 2016, as well as other interventionist policies on housing demand on both a provincial and local level.

The 26 signatories of the letter to the various federal and provincial leaders include the heads of Abstract Developments, Ascend Projects, Amacon, Beedie Living, Bonnis Properties, Cressey Group of Companies, Contour Developments, Edgar Development, Enrich Developments, Executive Group, GMC Projects, ICBA, Infinity Group, Intracorp, Mosaic Homes, PATH Developments, Persis, Polygon, Pooni Group, Strand Development, Wall Financial Corporation, Weathervane Real Estate, Wesbild, and Westbank.

The appeal adds to a growing debate over Canada’s approach to housing policy. While recent federal and provincial measures targeted speculative demand and international investment in an effort to cool home prices, critics say these restrictions have reduced private capital for new developments without addressing the underlying barriers to supply, such as high construction costs, long permitting timelines, and labour shortages.

Newly built individual investor privately owned condominiums also previously accounted for the leading proportion of Metro Vancouver’s new rental housing supply. In more recent years, new developer-owned secured purpose-built rental housing saw a major resurgence, but such new projects entering construction are also beginning to taper off due to exceedingly high construction costs and development fees.

Although there will be a sharp increase in newly built secured purpose-built rental housing over the short term from the projects that squeaked past the finish line before economic conditions worsened further, this represents a double-whammy in rental housing supply over the long term.

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