For condo towers, things are mostly going to be OK even if no one is living in the unit. You pay your strata fees & the strata takes care of most of the things

For condo towers, things are mostly going to be OK even if no one is living in the unit. You pay your strata fees & the strata takes care of most of the things which become a problem simply due to the passage of time. For single family detached, the value of the building is not a big deal. It's the dirt the building sits on that people are buying. Prices went up ~30% over the last year in Vancouver. There are also buyers who think nothing of tearing down a relatively new building because it's not quite what they want. As long as the city remains a place people wish to live, the dirt will retain value. Perhaps it goes down 50-80% - you can live on your land or you can use its cash flows to help cover your living expenses. As a safe-haven, it's not a bad option. The price in CAD/USD/EUR/CNY/XBT is almost irrelevant to these owners. The problematic purchasers in my view are the locals. Many are buying because the market is going up - "I'd better buy now or I'll never be able to afford it". In a falling market, that demand many not exist. Though I also remain unconvinced that the foreign demand will remain strong in a falling market. What's going on in Vancouver isn't sustainable in any traditional sense. But the market can also remain irrational longer than many can remain solvent. I agree that the phenomenon of properties remaining vacant represents a failure. I'm curious what opportunities you think there are. I suspect that many of the opportunities would require regulatory changes to be viable, but I'm open to a different perspective. Regarding Chinese people understanding capitalism, I suspect there's a very different view culturally. I'm told that the advertising for financial products is quite different - in North America we tend to expect a convervative branding. In China you'll see investments with more of a WeChat approach (including being actually promoted on WeChat). Property rights were recently codified in China - i.e. 2007 or 2008. Real estate is mostly only available as leasehold in China. There's a lot of people who recently became quite wealthy quite quickly. I think it's very likely that they have very different understandings of capitalism than North Americans, who also have a different understanding than Europeans.