A tax on foreign homebuyers in Vancouver cut luxury purchases in Canada’s priciest housing market by more than half last month, according to a brokerage report. Meanwhile, high-end sales in Toronto surged.
Transactions in Vancouver of at least C$1 million (US$759,000) slid 65 percent from a year earlier to 95 units last month, the month that a 15 percent transfer tax on deals by non-Canadian homebuyers took effect, according to Sotheby’s International Realty Canada.
At the same time, luxury-home sales in Toronto and its suburbs doubled to 1,459 units, the high-end brokerage said.
The housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are heading in separate directions after at least a decade of similar growth. Vancouver’s tax, which took effect on Aug. 2, was implemented by the British Columbia government to cool prices in the city after they doubled in the past 10 years.
“We are going to see a clear divergence” between the two cities in this year’s final quarter, Brad Henderson, the brokerage’s chief executive officer, said in the report.
There are hints that international investors are redirecting capital to Toronto from Vancouver, according to Sotheby’s, which also forecast that Montreal will see more offshore investment.
In Vancouver, the tax “injected uncertainty into the market, and is anticipated to moderate sales activity and velocity in the fall,” the brokerage said.
The long-term effect of the surcharge remains to be seen and the city remains in an affordability crisis, according to the report.
The tax hit Vancouver’s condominium market hardest. Sales of at least C$1 million dropped 49 percent last month from a year earlier, after rising 29 percent in 12 months through July. There were no deals for condos priced at C$4 million or more last month, compared with four in August last year.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to