Investors who buy and sell real estate for profit in British Columbia are actually useful to the economy and the housing sector.
Now there’s something you wouldn’t expect Premier David Eby to say, considering he’s waged a seven-year war in government against speculators and those who seek to flip homes to make money.
And yet, that’s pretty much what the premier told a crowd of Realtors at the BC Real Estate Association in Victoria on Tuesday. In the process, he revealed his intention to try and harness that investor spirit — previously viewed by New Democrats as unfettered capitalistic greed — to boost his affordable housing goals.
“The shadow side of the work that we've done to address investment in housing is a lot of the existing real estate model around pre-sales, and everything else was built around the idea that people were buying pre-sales and flipping them, for example, as well as other kind of links between investors and actually building housing,” Eby told the gathering in Victoria’s Grand Pacific hotel.
“And so one of the things that we're looking at is, well, how do we harness that energy around investment — especially at a time when we're looking for investment in the province, and the interest in investment going into housing and real estate, and do it in a way that facilitates access to more housing for people?”
The premier said he’s actively working on such a program behind-the-scenes, to channel people’s desire to make money buying and selling properties into a more constructive mechanism for government. There is currently a weak market for presales, which developers typically use to help finance projects.
It’s unclear how any new government program on housing investment would align with the NDP’s two-year anti-flipping tax, which also applies to pre-sale contracts and came into effect Jan. 1.
Eby also pledged to the real estate crowd that he would boost protections for landlords — another sentence you would not typically associate with an NDP government that’s been primarily focused for the last seven years on boosting renters rights and making it harder to evict tenants.
Eby highlighted small-scale landlords, primarily families, who invest in multiple homes and want to rent them out. The idea seemed to tap into the hesitancy some investors feel in becoming long-term landlords, now that the Eby government has severely restricted their ability to operate short-term rentals on sites like Airbnb.
Landlords have been trying to flag about the difficulty they face in evicting tenants who damage property, fail to pay their rent or turn homes into flophouses for organized crime.
“I don't have details I can show you right now, but we're also looking at, how do we support smaller investors that might buy their own condo and then rent it out as a private landlord, but they're reluctant because they don't want the place damaged and what if somebody doesn’t pay the rent, and all these other things,” said the premier, who included landlord protections in his latest mandate letter to Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon.
“Can we find a vehicle where they would be able to participate in rental housing, building purpose-built rental housing, with professional management, and insulated from some of those impacts that they're worried about in terms of the behaviour of a particular tenant? And so we're looking at all kinds of things like that, because we want to harness … some of the energy behind investment in housing, but not at the expense of our goals around getting people into housing.”
The two olive branches to the real estate sector were part of Eby’s response to a question about whether investors have a role to play in helping governments reach the estimated 3.5 million new homes the estimates are needed to meet demand in Canada by 2030.
Overall, it was a surprisingly well-received session with an audience of Realtors and developers who have not always been supportive of his government’s housing policies.
They also gave lengthy applause to Eby at several points over his continued strong stance against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“I’m very proud of what you’ve done and how you’ve spoken for British Columbian on this issue,” said Realtor Ray Harris, who rose to ask Eby a question.
An unusual address, to an unusually-supportive crowd, during unusual political times.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
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