Reply to comment

This is great, George. I've been tracking Vancouver real estate obsessively for a few years. We really miscalculated when we moved back here in late 1999; it was in retrospect an amazing buying opportunity--I thought that with the downturn (dot com bubble etc.) we were going to go in the opposite direction.

But now, Vancouver is astronomically expensive. The multiplier of median income to median home price is somewhere around 11, which is several percentage points higher than New York City! Totally insane. I've been following several real estate blogs here, for example The Greatest Real Estate Anywhere!, by a local realtor, and Greater Fool, by a former Member of Parliament. The consensus among real estate "bears" was, until recently, that we'd be about two years behind the U.S. downturn. And in fact, last year prices started to fall. But this year, there seems to have been a turnaround, spurred mostly by extremely low interest rates--we're currently pre-approved at 3.7%, and could do better--and though all the data is still not in, it seems that there has been a rebound after a correction of about 10-12%, depending on area.

So now the question is whether we'll actually have a crash. Garth Turner (Greater Fool blog, above), is still adamant that we will. But right now we really can't afford anything decent: we're essentially priced out even with a household income that's about double the Vancouver median. People are spending north of 70% of their income on housing here, which we're just not willing to do: if (no, when) interest rates go up a couple of percentage points, there are going to be a lot of people hurting at mortgage renegotiation time.

For Canada, a good source of information that's roughly equivalent to the U.S. Case-Shiller index is Teranet.

Curious to know where you bought, and how much you paid, including price per square foot. (BTW, I suspect you meant to write that you bought in September 2008, not 2009.)

(I feel really guilty using so many parentheses, after you've told me I scolded you years ago for doing so (at least I don't have double sets (oh dang.).).)