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This Airbnb alternative won’t destroy Canada’s housing market
(breachmedia.ca)
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I'll jump in and offer my (uninformed) opinion. It seems that housing is seen as more of an investment. Developers build higher end houses rather than lower income housing because the profit margins are higher. In this context, reducing the value of housing as an investment by making it harder for owning multiple properties while making it easier for people to own one house could go a long ways to settling out the cost of housing in the mid to long term simply by changing the incentives on what to build.
Short term, just getting some housing supply out of short term rentals and absentee investors hands could put some more housing on the market now.
Is it enough? I doubt it, but we can do more than one thing.
Oh, okay, so the "empty houses in Vancouver" idea. Now, I'm also uninformed about the ins and outs of landlording, but it sounds like you make a decent amount being a slumlord with maximally many tenants, too.
I can, at least, attest that investments usually have their own economic logic, and there's no free lunch there either. If you want to make a lot of money from an investment, you either come in with a big sum of money to start with, or you need to get lottery-winner lucky. That's why I was a bit skeptical about that explanation from the start, and why the physical lack of supply explanation seems like the simplest one now.
I think the "empty houses" isn't all or nothing. A house used for an AirBNB results in empty hotel rooms, and is "less full" than a rental that is rented for the whole month. Likewise a large house, with a single occupant is less full than an apartment building on the same land with even a 50% occupancy rate. This is the whole "missing middle density" comes in.
My impression is that developers would rather buy a bunch of land, throw up some upper scale housing, sell it, and move on. You are right that building an apartment building and renting it out is also a viable investment strategy, but it just seems that there are more developers selling houses than landlords building apartment buildings. Granted landlords kind of suck to, so condo's would be better I would think, but what do I know?