Melissa Hart didn’t have to hear it from the Bank of Canada. She knows first-hand that Toronto’s housing market is overvalued — maybe even as much as 30 per cent — just from scouring MLS listings every single day.

And she no longer expects that to change.

Toronto prices have been out of whack for at least five years now, figures Hart, 33. But they have hit almost irrational levels in the last three years as bidding wars have exacerbated an explosion in the cost of freehold houses within an easy commute of the core.

During that time, Hart and her husband, Brian Wolk, 36, owned a house briefly, but found themselves too stretched financially. Since then, they’ve rented a two-bedroom apartment in the east-end while standing on the sidelines — watching and waiting for a housing correction that’s never come.

Now the couple find themselves facing another grim reality. They may have inadvertently joined the ranks of renters-for-life.

“It’s all we think about every day — that if we had just bought a house back when we first started looking, we would have overpaid, but at least we would have been in a house,” says Hart, who now has a two-year-old son, Max.

What do you think?

This week central bank governor Stephen Poloz warned that prices are overvalued between 10 and 30 per cent. But he anticipates that Canada’s housing market still is headed for a soft landing, even in the face of slumping oil prices that could send western housing markets into a downturn.

Hart isn’t holding her breath for the impact of oil to spread as far as Toronto, a market she knows better than some realtors. Almost three years ago she started up a hugely popular blog, FML Listings, which used MLS Listings to chronicle — and comment on — “Ridiculous Toronto Real Estate.”

While the blog has been largely dormant in the wake of her son’s birth, Hart still hears from frustrated and desperate house hunters who feel permanently locked out of a market that shows no signs of returning to reality.

Even Poloz predicted that the risk of a housing correction “is actually really low” and appears to be falling. This week national real estate brokerage ReMax predicted that house price gains will slow in 2015, but still average about 4 per cent for the GTA.

“The consequences of being a great city is that the demand for the (limited) existing housing stock is not going to diminish, especially when we have 125,000 people coming to this region every year,” says James McKellar, a real estate professor in York University’s Schulich School of Business.

“All you have to do if you really want to cool the housing market is adjust the immigration rate or raise interest rates.”

Even Hart admits she never imagined when she started her blog how much worse things would get for first-time buyers and young families trying to get a foothold in the city. (Even the average resale condo cost $394,225 in the 416 in November, not including maintenance fees.)

She’s finding even suburban semis are no longer that great a deal, especially when you add in monthly gas or GO Transit costs.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“There’s no way we’re going to ever be able to buy now, but it’s so hard not to look. You think, maybe today will be the day I finally find something …”

This fall, Hart and Wolk endured a final, fruitless search, armed with a down payment that has only fallen behind as house prices have continued to climb.

“We’ve been approved by the bank for a $600,000 house, but the average price of a semi (in the 416) is about $700,000 now, and that might not even be in a good area,” says Hart.

“Every time we saw something in our price range, it went for tens of thousands over asking or needed hundreds of thousands in renovations. By the end, even our agent was saying: ‘You should probably just rent because you’re not going to find anything.’ ”