Hey J, I like your plan. After a few years and many houses and bidding wars it gets really challenging to determine the first house which triggered the stupidity (perhaps an offshore buyer with an extra $500,000 he needed to hide), and by the time you do find that one house, it has probably traded hands multiple times. Even if that first house was purchased with a “dirty money” down payment, enforcement would be nearly impossible, and even if it were possible, what does it matter, how could you unwind thousands of transactions which all escalated in price based off this one comp? To say this is complicated is an understatement. Sadly, the only way this problem gets solved is if real estate prices crater, people get wiped out and the whole system resets itself. It’s happened before and it can happen again.

People are paying 500K++8 premium on some of these homes. FOMO is strong in Canada. Same crap happened all over the world. Proper regulations required and transparency required. Follow that moolah (when, where, who, why, how) – arm a new agency and reward them 25% of the dirty cash. You’ll get geniuses working for the gov. at that point. 250k/M to catch the bad people, gogogo.