Skip to content

Find Vancouver real estate expensive? Check out these exorbitant markets

Vancouver is certainly pricey, but average per-square-foot price for a downtown condo pales in comparison with some global cities
Monaco port marina
A view of Monaco's main harbour. This European resort city has among the most expensive real estate in the world.


We all know Vancouver is an extremely expensive real estate market – especially in terms of affordability, when compared with local average incomes. But even Vancouver's high average per-square-foot condo price is relatively modest compared with some cities around the globe.

Vancouver, being a young city with a relatively underdeveloped housing market, tends to have much more space in condos than a lot of expensive world cities. This brings down the average price per square foot – so you get a lot more condo for your buck.

Real estate website Point2Homes has published an analysis of condo prices per square foot in 11 pricey real estate markets around the world – Vancouver, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Geneva and Monaco.

Point2Homes looked at the price of a typical 185-square-metre (1,831-square-foot) condo in downtown Vancouver on its website, which it found to be a whopping $2,660,000. That comes in at $14,378 per square metre ($1,452 per square foot).

The analysts also found that the average price across all downtown Vancouver condos is $11,605 per square metre ($1,078 per square foot).

That number may be high, but it pales in comparison with Monaco, where the equivalent large downtown condo would cost nearly $14.9 million. In this European resort city, the average downtown condo costs $82,766 per square meter, or $7,689 per square foot.

Hong Kong was found to be the second most-expensive downtown condo market, in terms of price per square metre, followed by London, Singapore and New York.

In fact, on a cost-vs-size basis, Vancouver was the least-pricey downtown condo market of the 11 cities studied.

The study authors wrote, “The results show that Vancouver might be expensive, but only for Vancouverites. The other cities in our analysis completely eclipsed Canada’s most exorbitant market.”

Check out Point2Homes’ interactive graph to see the rankings, below.