Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.
People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc.
It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited.
If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer.
Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.
Just in October they announced that the child healthcare system was at capacity and they might have to start diverting patients to other provinces. How does that work for people who aren't on remote engineer salary, and how does that bode for the future of halifax?
The answer for us is that all the local service providers live far outside the core urban areas and have terrible commutes. Or they double or triple-up, multiple families per unit. As the area becomes increasingly unlivable for people that do the local gruntwork, a number of them leave the metro area. Those that stay have less competition, and so they start charging higher wages. Eventually the local economy equalizes at a much higher price point; local service workers find they make a livable wage again; globalized tech workers find that most of their income is eaten up by daycare, housecleaning, gardening, and restaurant meals out (to say nothing of housing); and the whole region settles into an uneasy truce, yet enjoys great geographic arbitrage opportunities over other regions. We can go make Halifax unaffordable and live like a king there, for example.
We moved to a town a couple hours away from Toronto, and the prices were shockingly comparable to Halifax, while Halifax household incomes are lower.
> Don’t live in big cities (go for smaller, more liveable towns).