And how much do your 'Occupancy Police' cost to administer such a system ? If it relies on a property owner filling in a form, they're just going to lie to avoid the cost and without someone going round to every single house and monitoring it for weeks and months of the year, you have no way to detect people avoiding the tax.
Super high property tax when I'm not there? Simple, employ a cleaner on some minimal wage and let them stay there when I'm not in town. When I'm in town, put them up in a hotel. I'll probably still save money on the property tax and I can claim to be a caring employer, helping with employment in town. The city council are evil job destroyers by sticking me with huge taxes.
Scotland implements a 'second home' variant of their 'council tax' [a weird name for property tax]. Depending on area, it's a locally chosen multiple of the standard tax. But that's based on whether people declare another property and there's a lot of overhead in policing it. I doubt if it actually raises any extra net income.
But what if your empty property is actually from a relative who recently died and the estate is being finalized? Does that get hit too?
It always sounds simple to just slap extra taxes on rich people (who always happen to be defined as someone other than yourself), but that often leads to unfairness to decidedly non-rich people.
Rich people always find a way round these things - they pay lawyers and accountants to make sure they can. No public policy will ever fix that.
I used to live in Florida and amazingly enough the homestead exemption works pretty well. I'm sure there are some people abusing it, but it's effective overall. You can only have it on one home and it doesn't apply to businesses so the only real fraud angle would be to live out of state and take the exemption on a single Florida property. You have to be a citizen or permanent alien resident which weeds out foreign buyers looking to park money. You'll also need to be able to access its mailbox, be registered to vote at the address, etc etc. A lot of potential legal trouble for a $50,000 valuation haircut on your tax bill.
The fact that Florida has no state income tax is an even bigger incentive to actually reside in Florida if you have a lot of passive income coming your way.
You can purchase Canadian permanent residency for $800,000 through Quebec's Immigrant Investor Program. This has a big impact on Canadian tax policy because there is no way you can discriminate between foreign and domestic ownership - foreign investors can simply buy a PR card and avoid punitive taxation of foreigners. There are still foreigners in the normative sense of the word, as in they don't and have never lived in Canada, but in the eyes of the law, they are the same as an permanent immigrant.
You can require presence in the country to a homestead exemption. If you aren't in the country for a large amount of time (say, 180 days) you don't get your exemption. Between that and having it only apply to a single property the incentives to park cash in an empty Vancouver apartment are diminished.
> Super high property tax when I'm not there? Simple, employ a cleaner on some minimal wage and let them stay there when I'm not in town. When I'm in town, put them up in a hotel. I'll probably still save money on the property tax and I can claim to be a caring employer, helping with employment in town. The city council are evil job destroyers by sticking me with huge taxes.
Doesn't that kind of help the problem though? Because now someone who would have to rent an expensive apartment is now basically living rent-free in a home. If enough people did this, it would help alleviate the issue.
I agree with your point though, and know people who do this. They are "caretakers" who basically live rent-free to make sure the place doesn't fall apart. The occupancy idea sounds good, but it seems like a logistical, administrative pain to enforce.
Why would you? Tax is a very effective mechanism to control economy. And don't have to think on extremes even! Very wealthy people are buying condos there just because it's the best (passive) investment for their cash. If you increase tax for vacant property it will incentivize selling over time,or at least renting.. more offer with less cost.
In a macro economical sense Canada already profited from getting foreign $ invested in buying those properties anyway, time to make Vancouver livable.
Super high property tax when I'm not there? Simple, employ a cleaner on some minimal wage and let them stay there when I'm not in town. When I'm in town, put them up in a hotel. I'll probably still save money on the property tax and I can claim to be a caring employer, helping with employment in town. The city council are evil job destroyers by sticking me with huge taxes.
Scotland implements a 'second home' variant of their 'council tax' [a weird name for property tax]. Depending on area, it's a locally chosen multiple of the standard tax. But that's based on whether people declare another property and there's a lot of overhead in policing it. I doubt if it actually raises any extra net income.
But what if your empty property is actually from a relative who recently died and the estate is being finalized? Does that get hit too?
It always sounds simple to just slap extra taxes on rich people (who always happen to be defined as someone other than yourself), but that often leads to unfairness to decidedly non-rich people.
Rich people always find a way round these things - they pay lawyers and accountants to make sure they can. No public policy will ever fix that.