Month: January 2021

Two Years of BC’s Speculation and Vacancy Tax Data!

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Last week, the BC Government dropped a press release linking to 2019’s data from the NDP’s Speculation & Vacancy Tax (SVT), leaving us with two years of data (!) and including a brief analysis of what happened to properties taxed in 2018! Maybe you didn’t notice? It was a busy week. I’ve been looking through the data and comparing across releases, and here are my big takeaways so far:

  • Overall, tax liability remains very rare (< 1%), and seems to be getting more so
  • The 2019 Technical Report revises some of the 2018 taxpaying figures, generally downward
  • The SVT may have added some rental in 2019, but probably not as much as claimed
  • Best guess: probably because we never had much “toxic demand” to begin with…
  • There’s some hint the SVT might have promoted divorce a bit & probably also migration
  • Some errors and lapses in SVT reporting make interpreting the data harder than it should be!

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