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Canada’s two most expensive cities for housing are seemingly haunted, not by ghosts but by the spectre of empty homes.

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of each of the 16 measures and the impact housing markets experts believe they will or will not have





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Some believe vacant homes exist on a widespread basis, bought up by a stream of investors so consumed by speculation — or just a safe place to park their money — that they can’t even bother to rent out their properties in markets in where the going rate can easily top $3 a square foot.

The vacant unit theory has enough backers that the city of Toronto demanded the power to levy an extra tax on vacant property owners, something that was granted by the Ontario government in April, and one that follows a similar path laid out in Vancouver by the British Columbia government in 2016.

It’s “the vacant unit red herring,” said Patricia Arsenault, executive vice-president of research at Altus Group Ltd. in a note about the data that seem to indicate there were as many as 66,000 vacant units in Toronto in 2016. That’s equivalent to about 5.6 per cent of the city’s total stock of 1.2 million private dwelling units.