CBC News and Yahoo reported on calls for an independent investigation into allegations of shadow flipping (the reassigning of sales contracts before the sale of a home is completed) in Vancouver’s real estate market.
However, UBC professor Thomas Davidoff told CBC that the bigger problem is not shadow flipping, but using real estate as speculative assets instead of as homes. He favours self-policing of real estate agents to curb shadow flipping, and suggested that the province’s real estate council could appoint external advisors to its investigative committee.
In another article on CTV News, Tsur Somerville, a professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, noted that 2015 was “somewhat crazy” in Vancouver’s housing market. “People seeing real estate as a way to park cash has really amped up,” Somerville said.
