Maybe from the POV from someone who badly wants to buy a condo, but from the POV of a renter who will never buy, these investors are the ones that are creating their housing.
No they're not. This is like saying the scalpers who bulk-buy all the concert tickets and resell at huge markups are "ticket creators." If you take investors (30 percent of home buyers, according to TFA) out of real estate then demand goes way down, taking prices with it and making housing a lot more affordable.
In Canada for decades there has been virtually no construction of purpose built rental housing. The primary new rental housing that is being created is wholly through condos being built and people renting out their condos.
Accordingly the only new product being created for renters is being created by investors buying condos.
Like it's bad that this is the case and this should change, but I'm just pointing out the reality right now of this present environment.
There would need to be enormous systemic changes to the dynamics of the Canadian housing market if we wanted to start banning investors from buying and renting homes. Otherwise rental vacancy will plunge even further and rents will go up.
I live in Waterloo. There's tons of rental housing being built here but all of it is targeted at students. It's third-rate shoddy construction by an unsavoury developer. Students complain endlessly about these rental companies but they have little recourse.
I'm not convinced that what we need is more of this low-quality "affordable" housing. I think the problem would be solved by cracking down on all the people buying second, third, fourth, ... single family homes and converting them into Airbnb flophouses.
Scalpers would be more like sub leasers here. The actual builders build the housing, but you aren't going to pay your rent to 1000 different people who all played a part in building it, and those builders want to be paid now, not over 30 years. So the landlord pays them all out now and consolidates the debt.
Landlords provide housing in the same way the supermarket provides food. They didn't grow the food, but they did enable it to get to you.
