Not to even get into how weird it is that something that is literally in worse condition at the end than the beginning, just like a car, increases in value instead of decreasing. And even more that this is the assumption, despite it being based entirely on demand and not at all on quality.

This is the scary bit for me. It doesn't take much imagination to speculate that homes are possibly dramatically overvalued at present and current prices are unsustainable. This can't end well.

The only time home prices collapsed was when the mortgages underlying them were shown to be funny money. This is largely not the case right now, at least in the US. I can't speak for Canada, but the US largely has a supply problem which can't keep up with demand.

My house lost about 60-70k from the top one of the years (I suck at timing the market). I couldn't care less - I'm not going to sell it anytime soon, and this price is imaginary anyway, and the imaginary price recovered half of it since then, and I still have no idea how much it would be priced when I am going to sell - but I'll be worrying about it then, no point in doing it now. Of course, if that happened every year for 8 years, that would probably be weird, but that would also mean I could buy houses with my pocket change by the end of it.

This is exactly how housing works in Japan outside of Tokyo and maybe a couple other places and I would say they’re doing a lot better than Canada.