[Elyra]

> Comparatively, immigrants don’t have the purchasing power to compete

What makes you say that? As someone who's currently dating a Chinese immigrant I have been made aware of an entire world I didn't know existed. They often have much better family support so their parents will send money from home to help them buy a house.

From her masters program at university, which was all immigrants because universities here seem to be taking advantage of the fact that this is an easy path for immigration, everyone in her class (80 people) already have a house. From my group of friends at university, only 1 of them has a house, and 1 a condo (out of the ~50 people I loosely keep in touch with, all with good careers). We would too if my parents had been willing to meet her parents partway and give us a 50k loan, but they preferred to buy a 100k luxury car for themselves instead (they also refuse to acknowledge the current housing situation).

She also found out from WeChat that there are a number of Chinese landlords in Toronto who own blocks of houses by investing money on behalf of friends and family back home to get around foreign investment regulations, and nothing is being done to stop it.

edit: I'm not sure why this was downvoted, it may be anecdotal evidence, but nothing I said here is untrue, nor did I make any claims other than there being immigrants who are able to compete in the current housing market.

[ebiester]

It's likely true. It's also relatively small relative to the amount of money being funneled through the REITs.