Despite inquiries and headlines, is money laundering through real estate still a hidden force in Vancouver’s housing market? A look at the post-Cullen Commission landscape and whether meaningful change has actually happened.
For over a decade, whispers about dirty money flowing through Vancouver real estate weren’t just the stuff of headlines—they were a persistent part of industry chatter, an open secret that everyone seemed to know but few were willing to confront. Then came the Cullen Commission, a sprawling public inquiry that confirmed what many suspected: British Columbia’s real estate market was—and potentially still is—a magnet for money laundering and illicit capital movement.
The findings were damning. Billions of dollars in suspicious transactions, often tied to organized crime networks, were funneled through casinos, shell companies, private mortgages, and high-end real estate purchases. The Lower Mainland wasn’t just passively affected; it was a central player in a much larger ecosystem of financial crime. Homes were being used as vaults, not shelter. And in the process, housing affordability for everyday British Columbians took a back seat to a much more lucrative game.
Fast forward to 2025, and the uncomfortable question remains: Has anything really changed?
Yes, there have been reforms. New oversight mechanisms, beneficial ownership registries, and stricter rules around transparency have been introduced. The BC government has rolled out Land Owner Transparency Registry (LOTR) requirements, and federally, the Canada Financial Crimes Agency is being developed to centralize anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement. But enforcement has been sluggish, the data is fragmented, and prosecutions remain rare.
Talk to real estate professionals, and you’ll still hear stories—cash deals with opaque funding sources, luxury homes sitting empty, foreign buyers with unclear ties to local income, and corporate structures that obscure true ownership. What’s different now is the subtlety. The blatant casino-to-condo pipeline of the 2010s has morphed into a more sophisticated network of trusts, nominee buyers, and offshore financing mechanisms that remain largely out of reach for local regulators.
And that’s the crux of the problem: transparency without teeth doesn’t stop crime. While it’s now harder to purchase a home anonymously in B.C., it’s still possible to structure deals in ways that bypass meaningful scrutiny. Many high-value transactions occur through private lending channels that operate in the shadows of the regulated mortgage system. Some buyers make use of lawyers’ trust accounts, exploiting solicitor-client privilege to shield the origins of funds. Others engage in house flipping or assignable contracts to launder money through capital gains.
Meanwhile, enforcement remains reactive, not proactive. FINTRAC—the federal agency tasked with monitoring suspicious transactions—has been criticized repeatedly for underreporting and under-resourcing investigations. Real estate professionals are required to report “suspicious transactions,” but the system relies heavily on self-policing. And when the financial upside is significant, the motivation to dig deeper can be weak.
This has real consequences, not just moral or legal ones. When illicit money inflates land values, it distorts market signals. Developers begin to price land based on speculative assumptions, not real housing need. Municipal assessments rise, trickling down into higher property taxes for everyday homeowners. Rental housing becomes scarcer, as investment skews toward luxury units that function as assets—not homes.
It also erodes trust. When the public perceives that rules don’t apply equally—when multimillion-dollar homes are bought and sold like poker chips while local buyers struggle to get pre-approved—confidence in the entire system breaks down. And once that trust is gone, it’s hard to rebuild.
The political response so far has been incremental. Announcements of new oversight bodies and data-sharing initiatives make for good press conferences but fall short of addressing the structural gaps that allow dirty money to flow in the first place. There’s little international coordination, few financial crime prosecutors, and even fewer successful convictions. It’s not that we lack the tools—it’s that we’ve been unwilling, at multiple levels of government, to fully use them.
So, what would real change look like?
It would start with enforcement: financial audits, asset forfeiture, and actual criminal prosecutions that send a clear message. It would involve closing loopholes in legal and accounting practices that allow anonymity and obfuscation to flourish. It would mean empowering regulators to act swiftly and independently. And it would require political courage to go after not just the buyers, but the ecosystem that enables them—realtors, developers, lawyers, and lenders who look the other way when the deal is too good to question.
Until then, the spectre of money laundering will continue to hang over Vancouver real estate like a fog—hard to pin down, but impossible to ignore. For those trying to make sense of affordability, supply, and demand, it’s a factor that can’t be excluded from the conversation. And for anyone who believes in the integrity of the market, it’s a battle worth fighting—not just for optics, but for the future of housing in this city.
Because as long as homes are treated as financial instruments for the global elite—or worse, as laundering tools for criminal networks—Vancouver won’t be building a housing system. We’ll just be building a facade.
