Vancouver House Prices

House prices in Vancouver are very expensive; North Vancouver being one of the most exepensive areas as well. Prices have risen dramatically in the nearly 10 years we have owned our place.

Below is a chart of an "average" house in the Vancouver area.




Its said that once you are in the market it doesn't really matter if prices go up or down since you will just be swapping houses. But is that really true? In our case no its not true; prices do matter. I started charting out the "gap" between the average attached house (what we own) and the average detached house (what we want to buy).



What these results show is that the average percentage gap is pretty constant; basically averaging between 33% with no clear trend over time. This means that as prices rise the amount of extra money needed to swap from an attached house to a detached house is rising significantly.



There are some variations in the numbers but the trend is clearly in the wrong direction for us. In May 2005 the gap was $213K, in May 2006 it has risen to $243K, and by May 2007 it was $324K. That is a lot of extra mortgage to take on ($300K at 5.5% over 25 years is nearly $1850 per month of EXTRA payments).

I don't have any data that shows what happens in a down market (if the gap increases or decreases or stays the same in terms of percentage). But it is clear that moving to a detached house in our area was going to be an expensive proposition.

Links:
http://cuer.sauder.ubc.ca/cma/van_res.html