I used to work for a company that had about half of its employees in India, and I was curious about the cost of living there. Looking at apartments in a major city, they were not a great deal cheaper than the US. People frequently claim lower salaries in countries other than the US are balanced by cheaper prices, but my impression is that a developed-world style apartment and car are usually comparably expensive pretty much anywhere, from London to Noida. Mathematically, cheaper rice can't make up for it if you are making enough to live in an urban area.

Similarly, a good chunk of urban housing in Canada, Australia and NZ are priced completely out of line with what median salaries in those areas could afford.

These are likely houses marketed towards "investors", aka rich people who don't need a mortgage or have a network of private lenders who specialize in providing credit for the house-flipping industry.

> These are likely houses marketed towards "investors", aka rich people who don't need a mortgage or have a network of private lenders who specialize in providing credit for the house-flipping industry.

Most international folks who want to move their money out of the country and into real property. This is particularly true of the Chinese and Vancouver, as the CCP basically owns all banks and can snap their fingers and make you poor. But they can't take land and houses in BC. Similar waves of buys have happened with Russians and a few after the new Saudi royalty started flexing their powers.

But it means a nice house in Vancouver (Kitsalano) goes for $2.4MM CAD while salaries lag behind the US. Even at US rates it would be dicey to buy a house unless you had a lump sum to hedge the risk of losing a job.

I live in the Bay Area now, but I grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand. I'm back home with greencard stuff at the moment.

On my parents relatively modest street houses are now selling for $850k. These were houses that cost $400-500k ten years ago. People simply do not make the incomes necessary to make these prices sustainable. I have one friend, of everyone I grew up with and went to University who's making north of $100k as someone in their mid-late twenties. Everyone else is making substantially less. Whereas in the Bay Area half of my friends are making $100k + (and often substantially more than that).

This is scarcity. It's caused by growing demand in population, and dwindling supply with less people building homes. The equitable solution is probably to split up land more, and let people convert houses to condos and the like.

That's going to change quite drastically quite soon. The talk around the industry and in society generally is that house prices in Aus at least are going to dip.