Originally Posted by
davidI
Real Estate has provided irrationally high returns for the last few decades, even with the great recession. Given that people are most comfortable taking on debt for a house and governments/central banks have used cheap debt as a tool to spur growth, it's only reasonable that the housing bubble has grown. Population growth has also helped. It's hard to see demographics continuing to support that unless the floodgates are really opened up to wealthy immigrants at the cost of born-and-raised Canadians.
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I have to think that what happened in Alberta and to some extent Saskatchewan from about 2004 - 2008 was a once in a lifetime blip. We built a house in 2002 that doubled in "value" by 2008 and the house we bought in 2008 is worth basically the same today. We had 15 years worth of increase in value squished into four - six years and it's basically been flat ever since. All I want to see is a steady 2% - 3% growth per year.
What a lot of people don't consider when they buy a bigger house are things like increased property taxes, utilities, maintenance, insurance, etc.. Those things can be insanely high over the life of the property if people are honest about calculating those true costs.
"Masked Bandit is a gateway drug for frugal spending." - Unknown303