For the past 5 years I've been trying to complete every post-war OPC baseball set. 14,000 cards in total, covering 1965 through 1994.
Got my white whale today. 1973 Willie Mays. Last card I needed for my '73 set.
Only ~350 away from all 14K. 1967, 1973 and 1976-94 are complete.
I can't tell you how many times I was told last year to not bother talking about HST, that the federal government would never extend even a temporary expanded rebate to non-first time buyers.
To them, I quote Ricky.
Overall, this is a great day! Delighted to see the province and the federal government announce a policy we've spent a lot of time researching at MMI. This will help make it easier for middle-class families to right-size their homes.
As such, having this run for a single year makes sense, to test it out and see how it works. It also creates a sense of urgency, and gets potential buyers off of the sidelines.
This will lead to increased homebuilding. Prov estimates 8000 homes a year. In reality, we really have no idea what the impact will be. Any models would use elasticity parameters estimated under very different market conditions; they tell you little about today.
These changes immediately reduce the price of new homes for qualified buyers (but not resale) by 10%+, which should help boost new sales while simultaneously avoiding increasing demand in the resale market.
One thing this rebate will do is allow condo builders with unsold inventory to be able to rent out those units without getting dinged on HST, which I suspect is why governments extended this rebate.
So it isn't available to all "investors". You can't leave the home vacant, you can't rent it on the short-term market, you can't rent it as a secondary residence (e.g. a cottage). But investors do qualify.
At MMI, it's not a rebate we've studied in any depth.
The second rebate (New Residential Rental Property Rebate) is a little bit more politically charged. Investors of new homes can qualify for this rebate under certain conditions: The buyer can't flip the home, it has to be immediately rented on a lease 1+ years in length.
The "New Housing Rebate" is only available to purchasers of primary residences. That is, people who buy a home to live in. We've done a lot of work at MMI, and have advocated for this change for some time.
