British Columbia NDP Leader David Eby announced on Friday that a re-elected NDP government would impose a new tax on newly built condominiums that sit empty and unsold for more than a year, part of a broader campaign platform unveiled in the first week of the province’s snap election, called for October 24. According to theglobeandmail.com, the tax would start at 2 per cent of a unit’s assessed value and rise by one percentage point for each additional year the condo remains unsold, meaning a unit empty for three years would be taxed at 3 per cent.
Eby, speaking at a Burnaby news conference with a condo tower under construction behind him, said developers are not selling units “at the price that people are willing to pay” and argued that developers have the financial cushion to wait out a soft market while ordinary families cannot. He cited an industry report from Real Property Data, which he called “damming,” estimating that thousands of newly built and unsold condos across Metro Vancouver are worth roughly $4.4 billion to $4.5 billion combined, according to nanaimonewsnow.com and theglobeandmail.com. Zonda, a new-home research firm, has separately estimated that nearly 4,000 newly built condos in the Vancouver region currently sit empty, according to theglobeandmail.com.
Industry Says the Policy Punishes Timing, Not Behaviour
Development industry figures quoted alongside the announcement rejected Eby’s framing outright. Ryan Berlin, chief economist with Rennie & Associates Realty Ltd., said the tax would effectively penalize developers for finishing their projects at the wrong point in the housing cycle and would add risk and cost to future construction, according to theglobeandmail.com. Beau Jarvis, chief executive of Wesgroup, went further, telling theglobeandmail.com that the policy risks the unintended consequence of discouraging homebuilders from building homes at all, and disputed the suggestion that developers are deliberately withholding units from willing buyers, saying there simply are no buyers even at prices where developers are prepared to take significant losses.
Independent analysts were similarly unconvinced. Andy Yan, director of the city program at Simon Fraser University, said he was still trying to understand what the announcement actually does, telling narcity.com that it is unclear whether the tax is meant to change developer behaviour or simply raise revenue. Brendon Ogmundson, chief economist with the British Columbia Real Estate Association, said in a written statement reported by ckom.com that developers would very much like to sell their units but face genuinely poor market conditions, and warned that forcing sales could impair builders’ ability to construct future housing, undermining the long-run affordability the policy claims to serve.
Eby also proposed raising the province’s existing speculation and vacancy tax, increasing the rate for Canadian owners and permanent residents to 2 per cent from the current 1 per cent, with a steeper rate proposed for foreign owners, according to narcity.com. Notably, Eby did not repeat an earlier proposal, announced jointly with the federal government in the summer, for BC and Ottawa to spend $1.45 billion buying roughly 2,200 unsold condos and converting them into rent-to-own rentals. Asked about that plan’s status, NDP campaign spokesperson Bhinder Sajan told theglobeandmail.com only that “there’s been no change,” even as industry officials have speculated the plan may have quietly died given the absence of operational detail.
How the outlets framed it
The Globe and Mail presented the tax largely on Eby’s own terms, framing it as a pragmatic affordability tool aimed at nearly 4,000 empty Vancouver-area condos, while still giving space to developers who called the measure punitive. Narcity and Nanaimo News Now pushed further, foregrounding independent voices such as Andy Yan and Brendon Ogmundson, who each said they could not clearly identify what the policy was designed to achieve. That gap between the political framing of the tax as consumer relief and the economic framing of it as a disincentive to build reveals a policy whose stated purpose and likely market effect may not align.
The broader housing slowdown behind this proposal is not simply a matter of developer stubbornness. Investor demand for condos has fallen sharply, and federal caps on temporary foreign workers and international students have reduced the pool of potential buyers, even as home prices have already declined from their 2022 peak, according to theglobeandmail.com. Whether an escalating tax changes that underlying arithmetic, or simply adds a new cost to a market already struggling to clear its existing inventory, remains an open question that neither the NDP platform nor its critics have fully answered.
