Flipping.
A CBC News video, "How big a deal is house flipping in B.C.?" embedded in a Jan. 1, 2025, article, "Tax cuts and tax increases. Here's what's set to change in B.C. in 2025," reports that flipping percentages are in the range of 2.8%.
Flipping is one example of the financialization of housing, but 2.8% is an almost inconsequential figure next to the 30% of houses and condos sold in Canada in the first three months of 2023 that were bought by so-called "investors," a number itself significantly greater than the 28% reported in the first quarter of 2022 and 22% in the same period in 2020.
Appropriating for the purpose of letting, either long- or short-term, houses and condos approved and built with the understanding they would accommodate households wishing to own their own homes drives up house and condo prices because a buyer whose mortgage will be paid by tenants will pay more for a house or condo than a household whose mortgage will reduce its disposable income.
Wealth concentrated in the hands of so-called "investors" who hold and let houses and condos inflates house and condo prices and rents further each time one of these "investors" accesses a housing market to add to their portfolio, a self-reinforcing loop that drives ownership of houses, condos, and apartment buildings into fewer, deeper-pocketed hands and relentlessly inflates housing prices.
"Building more housing" does nothing to lower housing prices if what is built is financed with debt and equity sourced from the private sector, built on private-sector land, and conceived and organized to maximize speculators' profit. Developers universally agree that only government and not-for-profit NGOs can arrange the delivery of affordable housing because for for-profit developers, "the margin isn't there."
Housing price inflation will cease if housing is managed as a public utility, a prospect the 67.8% of Canadians who own or are paying mortgages on houses and condos (and are indoctrinated by an enormous finance sector fueled by debt and asset-price inflation into assuming the price of their dwelling will inevitably increase) find impossible to comprehend.
House and condo price inflation increases individuals' net worth at the expense of decreasing availability, increasing price, and ultimately decreasing quality of public services such as healthcare, education, eldercare, childcare, parks, mental health and addiction services, public infrastructure, etc., as well as relentlessly increasing the cost of living, which drives up wages and prices and drives down the competitiveness of Canadian industry on world markets. (Canadian shipbuilding, for example, is priced out of the ferry market.) Canadians spend almost one out of every five dollars on housing, most of which could otherwise be spent on public goods.
Canadians are indoctrinated into understanding "economics" in terms of one's own cash flow and net worth. But we are a nation not a sovereign nation, it seems, dominated as we are by the United States next door and since the late 1970s we have stopped understanding ourselves as belonging to a society, having been reduced by stages to preying on one another to survive.
This can be reversed, of course, and we have a post-WWII history of social democracy in our own past. It is there for the reviving if Canadians can see beyond the "common sense" of every man for himself that has been pounded into Canadians' thinking for the last 40 years.