Canadian housing prices

Calgary house prices are expensive. They have gone up a lot. Vancouver is even more expensive. They have also been going up. But it still came as a surprise to me when I saw this headline here:

First-time homebuyers working in downtown Calgary are paying more per square square foot for housing than their counterparts in New York City, says an international survey.

Calgary more expensive than NYC? WTF.

But then you read the details:

"In Calgary, a typical first-time buyer would choose a one-bedroom, one-bath, 500-square-foot apartment in Mission or Connaught priced at $250,000 -- or $500 per square foot -- and have a 10-minute drive or 20-minute walk to the downtown business core," says Century 21 Canada president Don Lawby.

But in New York, first-time buyers are more likely to choose a four-bedroom, two-bath home on a 5,562-square-foot lot priced at $525,397 (about $375 per square foot) in Nassau County, which is about 45 minutes from Wall Street by subway or car.

What? This makes no sense. First you compare a one bedroom condo in Mission to a 4 bedroom house in Nassau??? Nassua is Long-freakin-Island. Past Queens, past Brooklyn, it is a 45 minute commute in some kind of dream world.Here is a link to Google Maps showing where Nassau county is. By car? It can take 45 mins to get to West 42nd from LaGuardia let alone Wall Street from Nassau. Maybe you can make it Sunday morning at 7am in 45 mins but come on, it is 32 miles. Heaven forbid you want to go crosstown during the day at all. It could take 45 mins to go 3 blocks.

32 miles away from downtown Calgary is Okotoks! Additionally, when you have a bigger house the $/sq ft goes down, a studio flat will have a higher $/sq ft than a 5000 sq ft mansion. Doing a 10 second google search I found a link which shows "average" real estate pricing in Manhattan is US$984/sq ft (in Nov 2005) versus a place in Calgary for ~C$500/sq ft. "Luxury" pricing in Manhattan runs US$1,477/sq ft or more than 3x the Calgary rate. Link here

So in summary - yes Calgary real estate prices have gone up. Yes they are expensive compared to what they have been in the past. Are they on par with New York, Tokyo, Paris or London? No. Not even close. In fact prices would need to more than double from current rates to get anywhere close. This is shoddy journalism, a shoddy study by Century 21 and Marty Hope at the Herald there should do some fact checking.