Why limit these fees to foreigners? Why not penalize anyone who is leaving properties empty?
Because there’s a big difference between an empty apartment in a city and an empty half the year holiday home out in the bush used by the whole family.
And why not give Australians an advantage in our own country? I’m fine with American companies having to pay more taxes towards us.
If you can afford a holiday home, you have enough of an advantage already
Mate, I earn below median wage and I could buy a “holiday home”. This isn’t something fancy, it’s a shitty old house in the bush.
What I can’t afford is a house where jobs and people are, the city.
Price of my condo: 85k
Price of my cottage: 50k
Bought in 2013 and 2020 respectively, both for sale for months and I’ve spent about 10k in each in renovations. If you can’t afford 135k in mortgage and 20k in renovations over 10 years then maybe it’s ok to just keep renting… Even at the price the condo sold at this year (170k) that’s 220k + 10k over 3 years for a home and a holiday home, perfectly reasonable for a couple.
Edit: Funny how people downvote when people tell them that, yeah, it’s still possible to find affordable housing…
The best way to give domestic workers an advantage would be to really raise property taxes, but make them subtractable as a tax credit. Credit… not deductible, so overall tax burden on workers would be lower.
This would be an easy and logical step away from taxing labour and moving to taxation of land.
I can’t read that whole article but yeah doesn’t make sense… a foreigner could just set up a trust which then purchases the property and leaves it vacant and you’re back to square one.
Vancouver, BC in Canada did the same, though they actually fully banned foreign property purchasing. I’m guessing it’s low hanging fruit that won’t get much pushback within the country. Hopefully these are just first steps, in both cases.
Really wish fucking anything were being done in the US.
Yeah they really need to fix that in the US… there also needs to be a very significant reduction of property tax for individuals that are enterprising enough to rehab zombie properties. Go to like any city in the US, and you’ll find so many homes that are sitting abandoned because the city has assessed them for such astronomical prices that no investor will touch them due to their condition… The only option becomes to demolish them at taxpayer expense as they fall deeper and deeper into disrepair.
That was a temporary 2 year ban on foriegn buyers, but it was too little too late. They already injected too much money and equity in to the market. I’m sure there’s a way around it too. Corporations can still buy property. And once the ban is lifted it’s back to normal and the prices are still fucked even with the temporary ban.
Temp residents, including students, also aren’t included in the temporary ban which makes it basically useless
Or, it could be that there’s like 300x more non-Aussies than Aussies so constraining the ability of foreigners to speculate on Australian real estate could be seen as a priority by an institution who’s literal job it is to serve the Australian people, first and foremost.
Last I saw half the elected lawmakers have investment properties.
They’ll never make any laws that will impose additional requirements or possibly impact property prices negatively.
