How big of a deal is home flipping in B.C.?
StatsCan reports 2.8% of homes sold in the province had been owned for less than a year from 2019 to 2021
Home flipping has been a focus for policy makers in recent years, with both the federal and B.C. governments introducing tax measures to rein it in — all in the name of trying to address housing affordability.
But how significant is the issue, and to what degree does it contribute to the housing crisis in the province?
New data from Statistics Canada sheds some light on home flipping, focusing on the period from 2019 to 2021.
According to the report released Tuesday, 2.8 per cent of homes sold in the province during that time had been owned by the seller for less than one year — the definition of home flipping.
"I don't think property flipping is a major cause of the housing difficulties we've had in British Columbia. In some ways, it's a consequence," said Tom Davidoff, an associate professor at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.
According to Davidoff, flipping is often associated with more volatile markets — a point reflected in the StatsCan data. The year with the highest flipping rate — 2021 with 3.3 per cent — was also the year in which home prices began to shoot up.
Alex Hemingway, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, echoed Davidoff's assessment of the impact of home flipping on affordability.
"This is a small segment of the market, and the segment of it that's damaging in some way — say, just holding a [vacant] property and waiting for a value increase — is going to be even smaller than that," said Hemingway.
According to StatsCan, 2.7 per cent of homes sold in 2019 had been flipped within a year. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, 2.3 per cent of homes fell into that category.
The report shows that flipping was more common in urban areas than rural. The area with the highest rate, Abbotsford-Mission, had a flipping rate of 6.5 per cent. The Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria areas also helped drive up the provincial rate.
Who is behind home flipping?
The data gives a glimpse into who was doing the most home flipping in the years examined.
Property flippers were slightly more likely to be men, who made up 52.3 per cent. They also tended to be older than the median age of homebuyers — 47 compared with 43.
According to StatsCan, immigrants were overrepresented among home flippers. They made up 45 per cent of flippers, but just 36.3 per cent of homebuyers.
Property flippers also had lower median family incomes, at $115,000, compared to $125,000 for homebuyers who did not flip a property.
Businesses were responsible for 7.9 per cent of flipped properties from 2019 to 2021, while they represented 2.6 per cent of all real estate buyers.
Will flipping taxes help?
The federal government introduced measures last year that make profit from property flipping fully taxable as business income.
The B.C. government's new home flipping tax begins Jan. 1, 2024. That will make income from homes flipped within a year subject to a 20 per cent tax, and homes sold within two years subject to a tax that decreases from 20 per cent over the course of the second year.
Hemingway, who calls the focus on flipping a distraction from other more critical drivers of the housing crisis, doesn't expect the taxes to have a significant impact on affordability.
"At the end of the day, I don't think they're going to move the needle in any meaningful way, if at all," he said.
"We've seen this kind of flavour-of-the-month scapegoat before. At a time, it was foreign buyers or empty homes, now it's flipped homes."
Davidoff said he doesn't expect any impact from the taxes in the short term, but potentially down the road.
Both he and Hemingway said the fundamental issue in B.C. is the amount of available housing supply for the number of people needing homes — something that they suggest more zoning changes could help address.
Hemingway also advocates for significantly more public sector investment in affordable, non-market housing.
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