Metro Vancouver housing market ranked 5th most overvalued in the world

Another global financial publication is reaffirming what we know about the local real estate market: housing prices do not match local income levels.

Based on a recently released annual study by The Economist, Vancouver home prices are overvalued at 65% higher than average local income levels.

Globally, the Vancouver region’s market ranks fifth in the world for the most overvalued housing markets, based on the 22 global cities evaluated.

Vancouver came after Hong Kong (+94%), Auckland (+75%), Paris (+70%), and Brussels (+67%), and was just ahead of London (+59%).

Other major urban centres in North America, namely San Francisco and New York, are overvalued by +27% and +4%, respectively, based on their average income levels. No other Canadian cities were evaluated in this part of the publication’s research.

Cities that saw an actual decrease in overvaluation against income were Tokyo (-8%) and Singapore (-8%).

As well, according to the publication, Metro Vancouver saw a 12.3% increase over one year and a 60.4% increase over a five-year span for house price changes.

The only other cities that exceeded Metro Vancouver’s rate of change over five years was Dublin (+78.5%); Vancouver came ahead of Berlin (+63.1%), Amsterdam (+54.4%), Auckland (+56.4%), Sydney (+54.8%), Shanghai (+52.5%), San Francisco (+49.1%), Copenhagen (+45.1%), Stockholm (+41%), London (+39.6%) and even Hong Kong (+39.3%).

When it comes to the state of overall national housing markets, The Economist ranked Canada’s housing market as the third most overvalued against average incomes, just after New Zealand and Australia. The Canadian housing market is 56% overvalued, according to the publication.