Photo: IQRemix/Flickr
Canadian real estate company Zoocasa recently looked at homeownership costs in 35 cities across Canada and the US and found that out of all of them, Calgary was most affordable.
In the study, Zoocasa ranked the cities based on the spread in US funds between the minimum income required to afford a home in a given city and the actual median income for households residing there.
By that measure, the median household income in Calgary, one of five Canadian cities examined, was $30,128 above the minimum income needed to buy a home, which was $42,885. Cowtown edged out Oklahoma City, where the gap was $26,381.
Zoocasa based calculations on the pretense that homebuyers would put forward a 20 percent downpayment and obtain a 30-year mortgage. Median household incomes and median home prices were taken from realtor.com in the US and local Canadian real estate boards dating back to December.
“U.S. affordability was calculated with a fixed mortgage rate of 4.5%, while 3.75% was used for Canadian borrowers, to reflect the average mortgage rate available to an applicant with good credit,” Penelope Graham, managing editor at Zoocasa, says of the methodology.
Canada may lay claim to the most affordable market, but it is also home to the second-least-affordable market: Vancouver.
There, the median income of $49,118 was an eye-popping $74,825 short of what’s needed to break into the expensive residential property market, with its median home price of $869,211 in US funds.
If there’s any solace for Vancouverites it may be that at least they aren’t living in San Francisco, the most unaffordable market of them all.
A median income in San Francisco is $140,003 shy of what’s needed to buy a median-priced home at $1,360,000.
Back in 2016, one economist speculated that Vancouver might be as expensive as San Francisco within two years, but clearly that hasn’t happened.
Check out the Zoocasa infographic below to see how your city ranks:
