U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants Congress to codify his plan to ban institutional investors like Blackrock from purchasing single-family homes as part of a push to restore affordability to the housing market.

Canada’s housing market is generally more expensive than the U.S. and ranks as one of the least affordable in the G7 when comparing income-to-price ratios.

Would a similar ban in Canada make sense?

The federal NDP says it could help, but would need to focus on rental housing, blaming corporations and real-estate investment trusts (REITs) for purchasing low-cost units, evicting tenants for renovations and then jacking up rents.

NDP housing critic Jenny Kwan said Canada should impose a moratorium on corporations purchasing new properties or at the very least, limit how many units they can own.

“Financialization of housing is happening here in Canada,” Kwan told iPolitics last week, noting that Canada lost over 200,000 affordable housing units between 2016 and 2021.

“[Investors are] using housing as a commodity instead of a necessity.”

Kwan said REITs and other corporate investors are buying up affordable housing properties at such an accelerated pace that for every one unit added to the market, eight are lost.

She said the Liberals need to do more than just promise faster housing construction and urged the government to end favourable tax treatment for REITs that allow investors to recoup proceeds largely tax-free because they are treated as capital gains.

Kwan accused the Liberals of blaming newcomers to Canada for driving up home prices when the real culprits are profit-driven investors, and called for Ottawa to provide new funding for non-profits and co-ops to purchase distressed affordable housing properties.

Under this plan, non-profits would have a right to first refusal for these units.

The federal government has pledged funding for such efforts, launching a $1.5-billion Canada Rental Protection Fund in 2024 that would help the community housing sector acquire “at-risk rental apartment buildings,” with the goal of ensuring they remain affordable over the long term.

Housing expert Mike Moffatt said who owns a rental property isn’t as important as the cost of a unit, which is largely driven by basic supply and demand.

Housing construction in Canada has gotten steadily more expensive and complicated over the past few decades while the country’s population exploded thanks to a surge in newcomers, he said.

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve made it harder to build while increasing the demand for construction. If you go back to the early 2000s, we didn’t have a Greenbelt [in Ontario], we had a far less restrictive building code, zoning rules were more flexible, development charges were, in the case of the City of Toronto, 1/50 of what they are today,” he explained in an interview.

“You make it harder to build, and then you add more people, you know that’s going to be an issue. We shouldn’t be blaming the newcomers themselves — it’s not their responsibility to make sure that we have a functional housing system. But you know, it’s absolutely clear.”

The Liberals have taken steps to slow the pace of population growth, slashing immigration targets and reducing permits for international students and temporary foreign workers.

These efforts appear to be working. Canada reported an over 76,000-person drop in population in the third quarter of 2025, the largest quarterly decline on record.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Liberals are planning further reductions. Ottawa’s latest immigration levels plan, released as part of the 2025 budget, would see Canada admit 15,000 fewer immigrants than originally planned in each of the next three years, and reduce new temporary residents by over 300,000 by 2028.

When it comes to corporate ownership, Moffatt said it’s certainly a factor for rental units, though companies simply aren’t purchasing a lot of single-family homes.

But he warned the rental units that have been purchased by big companies were typically neglected and required extensive repairs.

“These places became basically, in many cases, like slums, that were basically falling apart. There is this business model that some of the REITs and others do that they look for these buildings, they buy out the owners and then they fix them up and charge higher rents,” he explained.

“But where I think they [the NDP] are being a little bit uncharitable is the fact that the previous business model, in many cases, that the previous owner had was don’t invest in anything, let these buildings crumble and keep the rents low that way.”

How big of a problem is corporate ownership in Canada?

Data on corporate ownership in Canada is spotty.

A report from Statistics Canada found in 2023 that over 80 per cent of owners or residential properties owned only one property.

Just under 2 per cent of owners were business or a government, while the remainder were individual owners who had multiple properties.

The numbers are largely the same in the other jurisdictions studied as part of the agency’s Canadian housing statistics program — B.C., Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I, Yukon and Nunavut.

An earlier StatsCan report found that found that anywhere between 29 and 41 per cent of the housing stock in Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 2019 and 2020 was owned by someone who had multiple properties. This would cover corporations but also mom-and-pop landlords.

The 2021 Census found that over two-thirds of Canadians owned their own home.

It’s unclear what impact corporate ownership is having on home prices, which have surged since the pandemic.

Between 2019 and 2024, Canada’s national benchmark home price jumped by 45 per cent, far outstripping more modest gains in wage growth.

A report by Rates.ca found the average home was worth 8.4 times the average after-tax salary, compared to 4.9 some 20 years earlier.

While the national average price peaked at over $815,000 in February 2022, it has fallen to around $680,000 in the latest Canada Real Estate Association assessment.

Build baby build?

Tight supply has been identified as a major culprit for sky-rocketing prices, and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) warns the country needs to essentially double its pace of homebuilding to return to pre-pandemic affordability levels by 2035.

That would mean building between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units per year across the ownership and rental markets by 2035. However, the housing agency anticipates Canada will only add around 220,000 to 240,000 units annually for the next three years.

Freezing out corporations from the housing market could make hitting the CMHC target impossible, according to Tsur Somerville, a professor of real estate finance at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.

“We need a lot of capital flowing into real estate if we’re going to build 400,000 homes. So, saying, ‘oh, you can’t invest,’ seems a little bit problematic,” he told iPolitics.

“Particularly in the rental market, if you think who has $35 million available to buy a rental building, that’s not a lot of moms and pops.”

But economist Ricardo Tranjan said it’s short-sighted to focus only on adding units without considering the impact of corporate ownership, comparing it to trickle-down economics.

He said corporations won’t purchase the most expensive rental stock but rather cheaper ones to maximize profits, and will use renovations to evict less affluent tenants.

“A lot of the housing debate in Canada is focused on this notion that if you increase supply, everything gets better for everybody. And implicit in that argument is this notion of filtering, which is [what] housing people call trickle-down,” explained Tranjan, the Ontario research director for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think-tank.

“I think the argument ignores the fact that a house can be renovated and repositioned. What corporations do when they’re only acquiring housing is that they don’t build new houses, and they don’t also buy the new… housing because that’s kind of expensive. The profit opportunity will always be in buying this stuff that is cheaper now, and in bringing the price up.”

Tranjan said that’s why he supports a moratorium on corporations purchasing affordable purpose-built rentals as well as Trump’s plan to remove them from the single-family housing market, noting that while it’s not a problem in Canada right now, this ban would prevent it from becoming one.

What’s Ottawa doing?

The federal Liberals don’t appear to be opting to ice out players from the housing market but instead, are focused on supercharging construction, specifically by slashing fees incurred by builders, opening up financing options, investing in the prefabricated construction market and using public lands for affordable housing.

On developer fees, the Liberals committed in Budget 2025 to establish a $51-billion fund that would help provinces and municipalities cover the cost of housing-enabling infrastructure such as wastewater treatment facilities without having to resort to taxing new home construction. Part of this funding from Ottawa would flow to other orders of government via negotiated agreements and would be contingent on cutting developer charges.

Moffatt said developer charges can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home or apartment depending on jurisdiction, and a recent report from the CMHC found the fees were responsible for between 8 and 16 per cent of the price of a property. That study of 30 municipalities showed fees ranged wildly among communities, from $39,600 for a a two-bedroom apartment in Ottawa to $121,500 for a similar same unit in Markham.

But the CMHC also noted that developer charges may serve as a “substitute” for higher property taxes, “potentially lowering the long-term user costs for existing homeowners.” This is because without developer charges or help from another order of government, municipalities would have to pass on the cost of infrastructure to support new housing to existing homeowners.

The Liberal government has also vowed to resurrect the decades-old multiple unit rental building (MURB) scheme that allows investors to in new apartment construction to lower their tax bills by claiming depreciation and other building costs.

Moffatt said the tax incentive could help encourage investment but only if governments make it easier to build.

The Liberals are also looking to address that side of the equation, establishing a new housing agency — Build Canada Homes — aimed at getting Ottawa back into the business of building affordable homes at scale, including on public lands.

The goal is to fast-track affordable housing projects by providing a range of financing options, opening up federal land for development and streamlining the construction process through the use of pre-fabricated homes and other innovative tools.

The Liberals said the new entity would develop and manage affordable housing projects and partner with builders for the construction phase, providing $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to affordable home builders.

It would also provide billions in financing for prefabricated home builders and absorb all affordable housing programming — such as the affordable housing fund and the federal lands initiative — from the CMHC and also acquire additional land and offer leases, whenever available.

The agency, which was launched in the fall, has already submitted requests for interest for projects that would see 4,000 homes built on federal lands across five provinces and launched a national submission portal for proposals from across the country. These initial investments will target projects that can see shovels in the ground within 12 months.

A spokesperson for Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said the BCH represents a “bold new approach to increase the supply of affordable housing in Canada.”

“By transforming the approach to public-private collaboration and deploying modern methods of construction, Build Canada Homes is looking to build homes across Canada that remain affordable over the long term,” said Renée LeBlanc Proctor in an email.

For Somerville, Canada needs to do “a lot of things” to restore affordability to the housing market but it all needs to focus on making housing construction cheaper and easier.

“I really think that you got lots of levers you need to pull… and it’s a lot of coordination.”