Click here for HD version, crank up the speakers and watch fullscreen. Also on YouTube.

What is this?

This is a roller coaster simulation of the last 35 years of the Vancouver Real Estate market. The actual graph you’re riding is the inflation adjusted value of a house in Vancouver BC based on data collected by Royal LePage and calculated by the UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate. Some of the peaks and troughs have been rounded to keep the train from flying off the tracks, but other than that slight modification it is a precise scale model of the red line on this graph.

Because this is a coaster simulation gravity makes the downturns go by quickly. I suspect they may not have felt that fast to people who owed more on homes than they were worth and had to sell for financial, health or family reasons.

There’s been a lot of talk in the media lately about a Canadian Housing Bubble, the bubbliest market of them all being right here on the west coast. There are many people whose livelihoods depend on real estate sales that will tell you that it’s different here and that we won’t see a US-style housing market crash. Perhaps we got that out of our system in the early 80’s, but before you place a large bet on that possibility you may want to do some additional research.

Housing bubbles hurt families and damage the economy.

Here are a few high-res stills of the coaster environment:



