Actually Vancouver is never ranked in the top ten most expensive cities in the world. This is a myth that gets put around Vancouver due to Demographia's horrible annual which gets broadcast everywhere and horribly misinterpreted. They only look at a handful of Anglosphere cities and only look at housing affordability. But housing affordability is meaningless for gauging how expensive a city is -- you don't have to buy a house, you can rent, etc. Also, they have a stated goal of encouraging lower density and promoting sprawl and have ties to the automotive industry.
If you look at actual studies of the cost of living in cities around the world, like from Mercer or the Economist, Vancouver is closer to the upper middle in terms of cost of living.
Vancouver literally has a 0.5% rental vacancy rate right now. If you put up an ad on Craigslist for an apartment for rent it'll get 50 replies in two hours. People are getting into bidding wars on apartments.
Yes, it's an increasingly tight market right now -- I just moved at the start of August -- but rents are still reasonable here for a city of Vancouver's size and development. Though this may change if the market if the current tightness, which only started about 6 months ago, maintains for a few years.
The point remains, if you rent in Vancouver the city doesn't rank very high on the most expensive cities in the world list.
I'm not sure what you're saying here: the value of a commodity is measured by the probability distribution of being able to buy that commodity for a given price. If it's hard to find a unit to rent at price $X, that's the same thing as units being more expensive than $X. Imagine paying an agent to watch MLS and leap on offers for you, or paying other people to temporarily leave the market, or just spending your work-hours at home on the phone to realtors, etc. The inefficiency of those things is, itself, part of the cost of the unit.
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Actually Vancouver is never ranked in the top ten most expensive cities in the world. This is a myth that gets put around Vancouver due to Demographia's horrible annual which gets broadcast everywhere and horribly misinterpreted. They only look at a handful of Anglosphere cities and only look at housing affordability. But housing affordability is meaningless for gauging how expensive a city is -- you don't have to buy a house, you can rent, etc. Also, they have a stated goal of encouraging lower density and promoting sprawl and have ties to the automotive industry.
If you look at actual studies of the cost of living in cities around the world, like from Mercer or the Economist, Vancouver is closer to the upper middle in terms of cost of living.
Vancouver literally has a 0.5% rental vacancy rate right now. If you put up an ad on Craigslist for an apartment for rent it'll get 50 replies in two hours. People are getting into bidding wars on apartments.
Yes, it's an increasingly tight market right now -- I just moved at the start of August -- but rents are still reasonable here for a city of Vancouver's size and development. Though this may change if the market if the current tightness, which only started about 6 months ago, maintains for a few years.
The point remains, if you rent in Vancouver the city doesn't rank very high on the most expensive cities in the world list.
I'm not sure what you're saying here: the value of a commodity is measured by the probability distribution of being able to buy that commodity for a given price. If it's hard to find a unit to rent at price $X, that's the same thing as units being more expensive than $X. Imagine paying an agent to watch MLS and leap on offers for you, or paying other people to temporarily leave the market, or just spending your work-hours at home on the phone to realtors, etc. The inefficiency of those things is, itself, part of the cost of the unit.