Foreign Buyer Taxes and House Prices in Canada: A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract In August 2016, the government of British Columbia imposed a tax of 15% on foreign entities buying residential property in Vancouver. A similar tax was imposed in Toronto in April 2017. This paper empirically evaluates the effects of foreign buyer taxes (FBTs) on house prices in Vancouver and Toronto, using a variant of the panel program evaluation method with city-level data and a regression discontinuity design method with house-level transaction data. Our results show that the FBT reduced the house prices in Vancouver by around 5% from 2016:M08 to 2017:M12, and by something within the range of 7% to 9% in Toronto from 2017:M04 to 2017:M12. These effects were concentrated in the single-detached home segment in both cities.