As President Donald Trump’s trade war continues to roil the global economy, it can be hard to tell what to do about leisure and recreational properties in the United States, as well as in Canada and abroad.
For snowbirds who winter in the U.S. and investors in U.S. vacation properties, the question is whether it’s time to sell or whether economic uncertainty is actually creating a buying opportunity.
“These are certainly interesting times when it comes to Canada-U.S. issues,” says Matt Altro, president and chief executive officer at MCA Cross Border Advisors Inc. His company, with offices in Toronto, Montreal and south Florida, specializes in cross-border financial and tax planning for Canadians moving to the U.S.
In the weeks since President Trump launched his tariff war and started denigrating Canadian sovereignty, many of the cross-border moves have been the other way around, Altro says.
“We’ve seen a significant uptick in Canadians moving back home,” he adds.
“This leads to a number of important planning questions for sellers—as well as opportunities for certain types of buyers.”
His father, David Altro, a lawyer with Altro LLP, who assists with cross-border real estate transactions, says he has never seen as much interest in selling in 40 years of practice.
The senior Altro told the Wall Street Journal recently that calls from Canadians who want to sell U.S. properties have surged from about two per week to 20 or 30.
Reuters news agency also reports that U.S. real estate agents are seeing an upsurge in Canadians cashing out, leading to softer prices in warm-weather states such as Florida, Arizona, California and Hawaii.
The selloff makes a difference in those markets because, according to the U.S. National Association of Realtors, Canadians have accounted for 13 per cent of all foreign transactions in the U.S. in recent years, spending nearly US$6 billion on property between April 2023 and March 2024. Nearly half of the properties that Canadians bought during that period were vacation homes.
“The selling prices here are less than they were three months ago,” says Jaimee Linder, originally from Vancouver but now a real estate agent in California’s Palm Springs area. “Properties that were listed at [US]$650,000 have dropped by $15,000 to $25,000.”
Many Canadians are feeling uncomfortable in the U.S. right now after months of President Trump repeatedly referring to Canada as “the 51st state,” Linder says. Trump appeared to back off from those jabs shortly after Mark Carney became Prime Minister in March, but reinserted himself into the sovereignty controversy with remarks he made on April 23.
“I have to be honest, as a state, it [Canada] works great,” Trump said.
This kind of talk is stressful for visiting and expat Canadians in the U.S., Linder says. “If you’re at the dinner table, people want to know if you’re on the Red Team [Republicans] or the Blue Team [Democrats],” she explains, “and they’re trying to get you to cross from one team or the other. But the Canadians I know here don’t want to be on anyone else’s team and they don’t enjoy these conversations.”
The flip side is that while many Canadians are selling or thinking of selling their U.S. properties, the softer prices could be a buying opportunity for other Canadians, Linder says.
“As the saying goes, if something can’t go on forever, it won’t. That’s what’s happening with trade tensions—I don’t think they’ll go on forever. There are especially good opportunities for people who want to buy recreational properties as investments, perhaps to rent them out. Even if Canadians are staying away right now, people from within the U.S. and from other countries still want to go on vacation here.”
It’s probably too early to tell whether the trend of Canadians selling their U.S. properties is actually a buying opportunity for institutional and large-scale investors such as family offices or pension funds, says one expert in the commercial mortgage market, who asked not to be identified.
“You can try and compare the selloff and drop in U.S. recreational property prices to the downturn after the 2008 recession, but it’s different and the comparisons only go so far,” the expert says.
“This situation is much more emotional for Canadians. Also, the low Canadian dollar [compared to the U.S. dollar] makes a big difference. It’s costly for Canadians to be in the U.S. right now.”
Canadians who buy or sell property in the U.S. need to also be aware of the many legal and tax pitfalls they can encounter, Matt Altro says. Since April 11, Canadians staying more than 30 days in the States have been required to register with the U.S. government. That could be the least of the problems buyers and sellers might encounter, he says.
“You could be taxed punitively in the U.S. if you used a corporation to buy your property, for example,” he adds. “There are also estate considerations. If your U.S. property is for personal use, it could be subject to probate in some circumstances, which can be costly and time consuming.
“On the other side, if it’s an investment property, you have to think about liability. What if someone rents from you and slips and falls on your property and sues you?” he adds. It is also getting harder to insure against climate-related events in many parts of the U.S.
The mortgage market expert says he is hearing anecdotally about Canadians considering vacationing and investing more in Canadian leisure properties. “There may be more demand in well-known places like Victoria, B.C., or Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.,” he adds, “as well as secondary locations like Horseshoe Valley [near Barrie, Ont.].”
Maybe so, says Linder. “But the stories I hear from people who want out of the States is that they’re looking to other sunny locations like Mexico rather than buying into Canada,” she says.
But if or when the tense relationship between Canada and the U.S. eventually eases, she predicts, “there will be people wishing they were back here in Palm Springs when it’s the middle of winter and they’re up to their knees in snow and bailing out their cars.”
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