Who Can Afford To Live In Vancouver????

The wife and i were talking briefly about the housing market the other day( don't worry 1 mile radius-ers). We were talking about either knocking the house down, or buying somewhere else.

Our house is probably about 35-40 years old now, and things are starting to go wrong. The fence needs fixing, the roof had a bit of a leak(but its fixed now!) and just general maintenance stuff .. Its a bit of a pain because we don't want to spend any money on fixing the house incase we decide to rebuild. It would have been money wasted ...

I was looking into the markets a bit in the last little while and i cannot believe the prices of housing in Vancouver/Richmond. The average house is about $850,000 and that's on the low end. You would probably get something that is about 30 years old. Our house is probably about $200,000 less than that and we live in a 3 bed room rancher.

Who can afford that if you are just starting out?? Its totally ridiculous. You would both have to be working and making decent money. If you had no money down and was looking into buying a house, assuming that you could get about a 5% mortgage. You would have to pay about $4000 a month! And that's not including anything like phone bills, electricity, hydro, property taxes ... it would easily be over $4500 a month in just maintaining your house! That's insane... considering you could move out to Saskatchewan/Winnipeg and but a place for $150-200,000. Actually you could buy a few houses.

Everyone has been saying that the bubble is going to burst pretty soon and the housing market is going to burst. I haven't seen it ... I bought my house about 7-8 years ago for $246,000 and its tripled in that time. How much longer do you think this can go on for? I have heard that after the 2008 Olympics the housing prices will come down to a halt .. i guess only time will tell!!


I was talking with some friends about the Saskatchewan idea!! If i could get all my friends and family to do it then were in! We could all sell our houses and buy a few blocks! Wouldn't that be great? Who's in with me?? I wonder how much it would cost to name a street after me?