Every place's situation is different. In vancouver with $60k/yr average incomes and a decent enough willingness to build, it's housing-as-bank foreign money.

Every place's situation is different. In vancouver with $60k/yr average incomes and a decent enough willingness to build, it's housing-as-bank foreign money. You see it even more with rent & housing price ratios being out of wack. In the bay area with strong anti-building NIMBYs, prop 13 , a tech boom and some foreign housing-as-bank money leads to it's high prices. You see it in how housing prices and rent is pretty even in many cases. The places in the bay area that don't have fairly even rent/buy ratios are the ones who probably have money being imported. A friend of mine pointed out how there seems to be about a $2 million limit in housing liquidity in palo alto now since there was a law passed that required that sources of cash have to be disclosed for housing that is over $2 million. You can often see housing liquidity bands too in the '1 tech worker salary' & '2 tech worker salary' limits, mortgage lender down payment behavior and what not.