Despite the wildness of the Canadian real estate market in the last decade, I doubt this statistic is anything new. Canadians have been enthusiastic for investi

Despite the wildness of the Canadian real estate market in the last decade, I doubt this statistic is anything new. Canadians have been enthusiastic for investing in housing for a very long time. The Federal government of the 1990s got completely out of funding housing, leaving it to the provinces, which not only dramatically reduced social housing construction, but also meant the end of a whole bunch of tax incentives to build purpose built rental apartments. Accordingly the entire market shifted to building condos for individual owners instead of rental apartments. The business model for condo development is to fund them by pre-sales, often to investors which rent them out and eventually sell. When I bought my condo in 2009 the amount of units in the building owned by investors was more than 60%. The property manager said this was pretty typical. Over time the percentage of condos owned by investors declines as they're resold and owner occupiers are the more likely buyers of pre-owned condos. If the government wants housing to be less of an investment and more oriented to being solely a home for owner occupiers, they could pursue incremental taxation on secondary homes (Singapore does this), or higher capital gains on secondary homes. The unintentional side effect of dissuading housing investors however could be that financing condo development becomes unviable and the condos simply don't get built. With rental vacancy sitting at 1% in Vancouver (not much higher in other Canadian cities) and the Federal government opening the taps to even more immigration, dissuading housing development is not a good idea. A solution could be addressing the problems induced from the 1990s abandonment of housing by the Federal government, and finding a way to once again make it viable to build purpose built rental housing in this country.