Mark Lewis comments in STOREYS on how the real estate industry worked
to get the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property
by Non-Canadians Act (the foreign buyer ban) amended even
before it came into effect on January 1, 2023.
""When the government published the regulations a couple
of days before Christmas (to come into effect 10 days later), with
terms that were not expected and which threatened a lot of
commercial activity, that's when everyone realized what a
massively negative impact this was going to have on the ability to
build new housing," Mark Lewis tells STOREYS.
Lewis is a Partner at the Vancouver office of the Bennett Jones LLP
law firm, Co-Head of the firm's national Commercial Real Estate
Group, and is also the Chair of the Urban Development
Institute's (UDI) Legal Issues Committee in British Columbia.
His practice is predominantly focused on the supply side of real
estate and infrastructure development projects, where he often
works with developers, lenders, and other project proponents.
"Our clients were not anticipating that the legislation was
going to impact the supply side of the development equation; the
government's messaging when the Act was introduced was that it
was to be focused only as a demand-side measure to reduce the
competition for Canadians to buy residential property. As a result,
the impact of this legislation was an immediate shock to the
sector, in particular when the federal government published the
regulations under the Act on December 21, 2022," he
says.
Lewis says that the federal government did a poor job of
communicating and engaging with industry stakeholders, and that the
development sector "took the government at its word" that
the regulations would target demand and not supply.""
The full article is available here.
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