According to the 2021 demographia median multiple study, Montrealeres making the median local salary now needs 5.6 years of full salary to pay off the median-priced house.
It's considerably higher than in past years, which include 2008 3.9, 2009 4.6, 2010 4.9, 2012 5.1, 2013 5.1, 2014 4.7, 2017 4.8.
Montreal's property price inflation is a nightmare for home shoppers and for realtors, as they pull arrows from their quivers almost all destined to miss.
Very few offers get accepted, as the competition routinely leads residential properties to sell for well above asking price.
A Montreal condo listed at $450,000, for example, could easily go for $530,000 as competition remains fierce. Some properties have gone $200,000 over asking.
The places where you get the best bang for your buck nowadays, as judged by the ratio of average wage to average house price are: Pittsburgh, 2.6, Rochester, 2.6, Buffalo, 2.9, St. Louis 3.0.
The best deal in Canada is now Edmonton at 3.8. The best deal in the U.K. is Glasgow at 3.8.
The five least affordable? Hong Kong 20.7, Vancouver, 13.0, Sydney Australia 11.8, Auckland New Zealand 10.0 and Toronto, 9.9.
The only way to relieve the pressure is, of course, to build more units. The demographia people have urged various places to loosen restrictions on rezoning non-residential outlying land to residential, in other words, unleash more urban sprawl.
Montreal could also solve many of its problems by making life easier for developers and allowing them to build huge projects that could house tens of thousands of people, without making too much red tape around the process.