Effective April 21, 2017, A “foreigner” has to pay an extra 15% tax on top of the real estate purchased if it is located in the Greater Golden Horseshoe region, this is called NRST (non-resident speculation tax). The official and complete information of NRST can be found from the Ministry of Finance’ website.
And let’s see if we can help our client to get it back (it’s pretty much a 100% refund but most of the people call it “rebate”, anyway).
Who are eligible for the NRST refund
- International students who have been conducting full-time study for 2 years.
- Foreign nationals who hold a valid work permit and have been working full-time job(s) for one year
- Foreign nationals who have become Canadian PR
How to get the refund
There would be 3 sections of documents submitted to the Ministry of Finance to get the money back.
- Personal identity and the proof of eligibility (letter from the university’s admin office, employment letter, PR document)
- Documents related to the real estate purchase (agreement of sale & purchase, land transfer deed, NRST payment receipt, statement of adjustment)
- Proof of residence. We have to say most of the failures of NRST rebate application are due to the inadequate or inaccurate documents in this category, in reality teaching our clients how to prepare the proof of residency documents is our ongoing practice. Therefore, we’d suggest NRST Rebate applicants contact their accountants half year prior to the time of application.
How to work with us to get all the documents ready
We understand it’s a long period of time to get ready all the aforementioned documents and it could be an exhausting practice at clients’ side, therefore we encourage our clients that, as long as some pieces of documents ready on hand, please use our secure upload portal to send us documents from your phone and your computer. Such way you don’t have to keep them in mind and it’ll be a much easier procedure for both clients and us.