Canada Extends Its Ban on Foreign Ownership

Early in 2025, Canada announced that it would extend its ban on foreign ownership of Canadian housing through the end of 2026. The law, intended to keep locals from getting priced out of the housing market, was originally meant to expire at the end of 2024.

John Faratro, Managing Partner of The Agency Montreal, said that the policy has led to a slowdown in the downtown and luxury condo market, which was largely propped up by foreign buyers.

“Prices have dropped a little bit,” Faratro said. “We have some developers in difficult situations because that whole market has disappeared.”

While prices have cooled down in Canada’s urban centers since the pandemic, it’s hard to separate out the impact of the ban from the overall cooling effect that high interest rates have had on the market, he said.

Some foreign clients have also found workarounds to the restrictions. Visa holders in Canada, including students, can still purchase residences. In some cases, parents with children studying in Canada have loaned money to their children to buy a property, rather than purchasing the property themselves.

Additionally, foreign buyers are still able to purchase homes outside of urban areas, making it still possible to buy in ski resorts or lakeside towns, Faratro said.

“This policy was mostly created for two of the hottest markets in Canada — Vancouver and Toronto,” Faratro said. “We’ve seen less impact in other places.”

For its part, Spain offers a remote worker or “digital nomad” visa, which allows its holders to work remotely in the country for up to three years and pay a fixed income tax of 15% in return for bringing a foreign salary.

In Marbella on Spain’s southern coast, 7.1% of buyers in the last year took advantage of the golden visa plan, driven mainly by Russian and British buyers, says Leif Orthmann, Managing Partner of The Agency Marbella.

Still, it’s difficult for agents to judge whether purchases of luxury properties were motivated by the residency permit, or if the golden visa was simply an “add-on” for these buyers who would have bought property in any case.

Orthmann did have one client—an American—who rushed to buy something over the summer before the golden visa program ended. But stories like this are more the exception than the norm, he says.

“We don’t really expect to see the golden visa have a major impact on prices in the luxury market,” Orthmann says. Alby Euesden, Managing Director of The Agency in Mallorca, agreed. “When you draw back the curtains on the golden visa, there are plenty of other ways one can set things up that could be even more lucrative,” Euesden says.

In his market, Euesden has seen few golden visa transactions. Most of his clients in Mallorca come from within Europe—Britons, Germans and Northern Europeans—but they use their Mallorcan homes as a vacation destination, not a path to residency. Few Britons have applied for the program as they’d already bought their homes pre-Brexit, and golden visa applicants must apply for the visa within five years of making their home purchase.

More than the golden visa program, it’s the increase in demand from luxury travelers that has bolstered the market there, he says. Prices on the island increased by 10.6% from 2022 to 2023, representing one of the largest increases in real estate prices across the country.

“Markets continue to increase steadily here,” Euesden says. “It’s a destination market, so most of the people who are buying here are buying a place to use as a holiday home.” A residency permit, he says, isn’t necessarily on many buyers’ minds.

More than any direct impact on property sales, the program’s real impact was the way it marketed these countries to luxury buyers globally.

“It’s been good for these countries, because it’s brought attention upon them,” Neto says. “In terms of numbers and metrics, the program wasn’t significant— it was the power of people talking about it that was.”