This is normally done via a "Homestead" tax exemption, where if your vacation home is assessed at $100K, you get taxed on all $100K, but if you live on it, you only get taxed on $100,000-N, where N is the exemption. This is meant to encourage owners occupying their homes, which is a great thing. I don't know if they have it in Vancouver.
In California, the exemption is a measly $7000. Which is essentially nothing, given home prices in the Bay Area. What they need to do is increase that number 10-20X or make it a percentage of the home's value. This would greatly help solve the problem of foreign "investors" buying up all the housing, leaving it vacant, and essentially just treating homes like bars of gold in a safe.
And don't even get me started on Prop 13, which is essentially mechanism to transfer wealth from younger, newer residents to older residents.
I'd like to just see a return to homesteading period. If a property goes unused / unoccupied for a year, anyone can move in. No more land squatting to drive up real estate prices and use it as a store of wealth.
Yes, this kills real estate as a long term investment. No, that is a good thing, we should collectively much rather see capital invested in the stock market rather than being thrown into precious metals or property as a store of value.
Except I'm not - there already exist squatters rights to occupy someones elses property and eventually claim it their own if they can avoid detection long enough.
All that takes is the minimum effort to police the property you own to insure nobody is squatting. What I'm saying is that unconditionally whether or not someone is illegally occupying your property you only have a fixed amount of time to make use of it before it effectively becomes unclaimed land again.
My recollection of squatter's rights is that the owner has to know you are there, and do nothing for <X> years. If you are hiding, you can't lay claim.
"Land Registry will decide if your application is valid and will let the property owner know. The owner has 65 days to object - your application will usually be automatically rejected if they do."
So basically you'll only get to stay if the property is effectively abandoned.
In California, the exemption is a measly $7000. Which is essentially nothing, given home prices in the Bay Area. What they need to do is increase that number 10-20X or make it a percentage of the home's value. This would greatly help solve the problem of foreign "investors" buying up all the housing, leaving it vacant, and essentially just treating homes like bars of gold in a safe.
And don't even get me started on Prop 13, which is essentially mechanism to transfer wealth from younger, newer residents to older residents.