[justnoise]

Well you'll never get your wish if you keep wishing for that!

While it's a small sample size, I keep on hearing of friends who want to buy a house but are waiting for the current "bubble" to deflate a bit. Combine that with a limited supply in popular metro areas, a larger percentage of young (and old!) people renting and you get demand that will likely last a while (yes my personal sample size of N is small). As the renting population ages and sees themselves flushing thousands down the pipe every month, more renters will be saving up war-chest sized nest eggs to make the plunge into home ownership. I suspect that'll prop up prices for a good while.

If you want to buy a house, I don't think you can count on another great downturn to make popular locations more affordable. More likely it'll take an increase in supply or some major change in our lives to push people out of cities.

Cue popular rant on housing density

[cpncrunch]

>limited supply in popular metro areas

Is it really a limited supply, or just speculators buying them and not bothering to rent them out? Vancouver has 25000 empty homes.

[justnoise]

In the case of US cities (sorry, I don't know about research that covers Canadian cities) research shows it's a limited supply and failure/inability to grow that makes popular cities expensive: https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing

Edit: They key section of that study is the section called "Expensive cities and expansive cities"