The law that forbids non-residents from acquiring homes in most areas has affected the luxury end of urban markets, experts say
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Canada’s government has extended through the end of 2026 a controversial ban on foreign home buyers that took effect last January after years of debate.
“For years, foreign money has been coming into Canada to buy up residential real estate, increasing housing affordability concerns in cities across the country, and particularly in major urban centres,” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance, said in a news release yesterday. “Foreign ownership has also fuelled worries about Canadians being priced out of housing markets in cities and towns across the country.”
The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act forbids non-citizens from buying residential property in most urban areas, though it includes a long list of exceptions. Property in many rural and “recreational” regions is exempt; most students, refugees, permanent residents, spouses of Canadian citizens, and some temporary workers in Canada may still buy homes.
While the government says the ban will help ease Canada’s severe housing crunch, critics in the real estate industry counter that the prohibition is misguided―and ineffective.
“The newly announced two-year extension is completely unnecessary, considering the fact there is no analysis, evidence or data from Statistics Canada, CMHC [Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation] or Finance Canada, to support the government’s intended impact on housing affordability in Canada,” said Janice Myers, CEO of the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), in a statement Monday. “If the government decides to move forward with this baseless extension, CREA urges them to consider recommendations including exempting pre-construction financing, defining and exempting recreational property, including CUSMA [Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement] exemptions, and giving provinces input to tailor to their housing market requirements,” she added.
Don Kottick, the president and CEO of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, agreed.
“Canada’s housing market has been driven almost entirely by the housing needs and demands of locals, as well as by population gains due to in-migration of Canadians from other cities, and through immigration,” he told Mansion Global in an email. “The extension of the foreign buyers ban will continue to have little or no impact on housing affordability and housing prices. This policy has only confused and frustrated those from other countries with crucial skills, talent and capital that Canada has been striving to attract and retain.”
The ban has also chilled luxury home sales in key markets like Toronto, said Maureen O’Neill, manager of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada in Toronto. “People who want to sell houses for more than C$5 million [US$3.92 million] can no longer rely on the buyers they used to count on globally,” she said. “It’s another extra burden on selling a house.”
That burden may soon get even heavier; Toronto’s mayor last week endorsed a 10% tax on foreign home buyers in that city, Canada’s largest. The province of Ontario already imposes its own 25% “non-resident speculation tax” on foreign buyers.
Though Canadian data on non-resident buyers is limited, the CBC last year reported that in British Columbia―one of the nation’s hottest housing markets―only about 1.1% of transactions in 2021 involved a foreign buyer, a drop of 3% in 2017. At the time, Ontario’s government told the CBC it had seen “a downward trend” in foreigners buying property since it began taxing non-resident purchases in 2017.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
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A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
