"My wife and I bought our first home in Oshawa in 1989 for $178K. Seven years later, after many renovations, we could only sell it for $148K."

“My wife and I bought our first home in Oshawa in 1989 for $178K. Seven years later, after many renovations, we could only sell in for $148K. Mind you, we then bought in the same down market in Toronto’s High Park area. The home we bought in Toronto, for $325K, had been listed at $580K just 18 months before we bought it. That gives you some sense of how the market corrected. We sold that same house this spring, for $975K, exactly three times what we paid for it 16 years ago. It obviously does depend on when you buy and when you sell, it always has. BUT, we are experiencing prolonged and historic low interest rates, and Mr. Flaherty’s creation of the 0 down/40 year amortization did create a subprime effect here in Canada. We have never seen a run-up in home prices like this before. The correction, one would think, will be greater than the ones we’ve seen in the past, given that so many people are so over-leveraged.”
- comment by ‘ReMaxed Out’, at The Globe and Mail, 11 Dec 2012 11:27am

“We have never seen a run-up in home prices like this before. The correction, one would think, will be greater than the ones we’ve seen in the past..”
That’s pretty much our opinion, too. Perhaps the Vancouver 1980′s bust will compare. – vreaa