Kutega21

Thank you for the welcome :-) We both work in very specialised industries, my husband in forensics, myself in International Development, so it seems big cities are where we would need to be. My husband would be the main applicant and we have a rough idea that residence is possible.
In terms of housing we're not put off by high prices coming from London, not that we're loaded, but we'll look for the best value for our circumstances. I'd say our upper limit would probably be about 700,000 CAD.

Kutega21

Thanks everyone for your ideas, very helpful to know which suburbs are better located for Vancouver airport. It takes me 75 minutes to commute 13 miles from South to SW London at the moment - and that is leaving house at 6:45 AM to beat the traffic. How does this compare with Vancouver and Toronto?

Orangeville and Kleinburg - could you tell me more about them please? They weren't on my radar.

withabix

To continue the pedantry, it only became Metro Vancouver Regional District (MVRD) on 30th January 2017.

Metro Vancouver is actually only the name of the political body and service provider that oversees the Metro Vancouver Regional District's 24 local authorities.

You will actually find that most of Metro Vancouver's documents still refer to Greater Vancouver Regional District and it will probably take a few years to change - we are still getting Contracts in the old name - which probably makes them illegal!

withabix

That puts you out of the market for a detached house anywhere west of Abbotsford/Mission pretty much, or a townhouse anywhere west of Maple Ridge/Langley.

Unfortunate but true.

In the six years it took us to eventually move here, we saw the places we could afford to live rapidly diminish.

Kutega21

Hmm... Food for thought. What are the reasons for such price growth?

withabix

Demand, speculation, dumping of dodgy money by Chinese, immigration (internal Canadian and Europe, India and China mainly), radiation out of price rises in Vancouver itself, people cashing in and moving outwards (swap house, big mortgage and everything on HP for house, no mortgage, boat, RV, truck, hot tub all paid for).

My house went up by 40% in 15 months. Fortunately after I bought it.

Our company is struggling with staff retention and recruitment at the moment - people can't afford to buy or rent what they want to live in, so are typically moving to Alberta, where they can get the same house for half the money.

Reeders

Well, you are not necessarily limited to big cities and you could maybe even forget airport commute times while getting lower house prices if you just think a bit more out of the box.

If your qualifications are good enough for example you could look at both taking less exciting than front line jobs in forensics and international development, by falling back on the realm of academia.

While the pay might be less, other factors might make it worth considering. What made me think of this is the humour in suggesting that you could move from London to ..............London. London, Ontario is where Western University
(quite a well regarded University internationally, not one of the, used to be a Community College but now they get to call it a University even if it's second rate, group)
is located and they have programs in both Forensics and International Development.

You could buy a lot of house for $700k, in under a half hour of commuting distance at rush hour. Earning a bit less might not bother you so much given that.

Regarding Orangeville and Kleinberg. Orangeville used to be a quiet little town, now it's a long commute satellite of Toronto. Kleinberg was a sleepy little farming town until the McMichael gallery put it on the map. Now it is a nightmare for parking in the actual town with 'twee' and 'poseur' being the words that come quickest to mind. But as I said, to each his own.

I would never consider commuting from Orangeville personally but thousands do every day obviously. I wouldn't admit to living in Keinberg but many will quickly and proudly tell you that they live there' even if they have to bring it up in conversation themselves if you know what I mean.

I have no opinion on the Vancouver areas mentioned as I have never lived in the Vancouver area. I'm glad to see though that those who do have made it clear about the airport, bridges and commuting times. That's the one thing about Vancouver as a frequent business visitor that I hated. Downtown Vancouver I really like, getting to and from though I would really not like to have to do on a daily basis. In my opinion, any commute of more than a half hour is too much of your time lost in life.

Some comparison numbers and interesting comments here:
Commutes over 30 minutes unreasonable to Canadians

Bear in mind that those average numbers include people who live close enough to walk to work or have a short drive, so that's why the average is lower than the realistic figures people have tried to give you here for commuting from the suburbs.

I would also suggest that you forget about how much time you are used to spending commuting in the UK. You are moving to Canada and should change your expectation to what is acceptable in Canada. As the link I provided indicates, acceptable is generally regarded as 30 minutes. Those accepting more than that, are generally doing so because they have to. ie. can't afford a house that is closer to their office etc.

If someone commutes 30 minutes each way to work, that adds up to 240 hours per year which equals 30 8 hour work days you have lost from your life each year! So for every 12 years that you do that, you lose an entire year of your life! Accepting a commute of more than that obviously costs you even more of your life. So it is a topic that many Canadians do not take lightly. A shorter commute can often be why someone accepts one job over another.

You can check average (not rush hour) driving times here:
Ontario Distance Calculator, Driving Directions, Distance Between Cities, Distance Chart (Canada)

As you will see, Kleinberg comes in at an unacceptable 42 minutes and Orangeville at an even longer 63 minutes to Toronto. No thanks. To the Airport from Orangeville is 50 minutes while Kleinberg is 31. So again, Orangeville, nope, Kleinberg, maybe (don't forget the 31 is average, not at rush hour), if you were willing to live there.

Or you could have about a 15 minute commute to Western University in London from this house which would cost you under the $619K asking price.
https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/S...Ontario-N6H2R6

I'm not necessarily saying considering an academic job in London, Ontario is what you might want. What I'm saying is you're moving to Canada, it's a fresh start, a clean slate. You can think outside the box and change criteria to what you would really like and who knows, maybe you can find just that.

dbd33

Orangeville is the first place of any size to the northwest of Toronto that's free of the sprawl. There are some villages closer to the airport but I don't think $700,000 gets you started in Caledon anymore. Caledon is a distinct band of horse country between Brampton, which is part of the sprawl and Orangeville.

Like most towns in southern Ontario Orangeville has an older core which I would consider attractive, century homes, craft shops, lots of pubs and restaurants. Some nice older suburbs, large homes often ranch style on proportionate lots, Purple Hill is one, and then it has hellish new developments that have been thrown up in the last ten years and will fall down in the next. Sadly one such housing project dominates the view as one arrives from the south on highway 10. (I suppose a search of the forum for "griege" will quickly find lots of my vitriolic posts about the shitty boxes sold as new houses in Canada).

I've never been to Kleinburg but a neighbor to our Toronto office lives there. He runs a barber shop. He may have another source of income as he drives a Ferrari despite charging me only $10 for a number 2. Based on knowing this one man and a couple of his sons slightly I stereotype Kleinburg as being rich, brash and Italian.

scilly

Our little bungalow on a small lot in Vancouver increased in value by 27.5% from January 2016 to Jan 2017, and has increased by at least another 10-15% since then.

It increased in value over 85% in just 5 years


I am bombarded by realtors offering to sell my house for me for some obscene amount .............. both by phone and knocking on the door.

I tell them we keep a list of all realtors who contact us, and they are the ones we will NOT contact when we are ready to sell.

You should see them retreat ....... fast!!


In case you have not realised ................. Vancouver is unable to expand outside the current city limits.

If you look at a map, you will see that it is surrounded by water on 3 sides, and the boundary between us and the next city (Burnaby) runs right down the centre of Boundary Road (doh!) ................ houses on the west side are in Vancouver, their neighbours across the street are in Burnaby.

It can be interesting when it comes to municipal services such as sewers, water, etc

This geographical feature means that the only land available for development is what has already been built upon, or used for industry, or designated park land.

The city has been changing the zoning designation of land originally held for industry to zoning allowing housing ............ as a result there is now a lack of industry in Vancouver.

The downtown Peninsula now has no gas stations ............. the last one sold a few weeks ago. The land is too valuable, and the service station will be replaced by a high rise apartment just like all the other stations that used to be there.

Many thousands of people live in the Peninsula, and will have to cross one of the 3 bridges south to fill up their cars or get service.

The value of a house is actually principally the value of the land ................. which can be as much as 95-97% more than the value of the building on that land, especially when the house is more than about 20 years old.


I can't answer for the reason for the great increases in other cities, apart from the ones given in the quote above, all of which of course also apply to Vancouver.

Reeders

All reasons scilly why I would not want to live in Vancouver (or any city). I understand why people live in a city or suburb because they have to for practical reasons. I grew up in the city of Toronto and lived there most of my life but as soon as I no longer needed to live in the city, I was gone like a flash. You can get a lot more for your money (or just spend less, there's a novel thought) by staying as far away from cities as you can.

You know you've got something wrong when someone earning less per year than you has as nice or a nicer house in a small town and more disposable income than you do because their mortgage is 200k vs. the 400k Canadian average these days.

When I last lived in the Beach area of Toronto, I bought my last house for 450k (1988). I see that comparable houses now are over 2 million. This house is a few doors from where I used to live and it's probably one of the cheapest on the street.
https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/S...iffe-Cliffside

No one can convince me that they are worth that much money. You can buy a comparable house on a bigger lot for under 450k still in the small town where I currently live in Ontario. The real issue of course is always commute distances and times. People want to live closer to work if they can afford to and that always costs them more if they work in the city.

Almost everyone heads to the big cities and of course there are reasons why some people do need to do that but not everyone does. That's why I am suggesting to Kutega21, that they may want to think a bit more out of the box. The assumption that it has to be a big city is a common one but not always actually the case, just like many assumptions, that make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.

In our little town of 3000, a new Medical Centre opened a few years ago. Before that, the town had 1 doctor. As he got nearer to retirement, he tried very hard to recruit a replacement with no luck. He found young doctors who were interested but they wanted new and modern facilities etc. A local, non-profit Farmer's Mutual put $1 million in the pot to build a new medical centre. Then the local people donated another $500k to equip it with all the latest technology etc. Within 2 years we had 5 new doctors working from there. Where did those doctors come from? Immigrants each and every one. That's 5 doctors who could no doubt be earning more in a city but chose not to. That's 5 doctors in a town that only had 1 before. Compare that to the cities where people can't even get on a family doctor's waiting list for new patients.

I asked our new dentist (we have no shortage of them either) why she chose to move to our town. She qualified first in China and then at the U of T in Toronto where she won awards and graduated with distinction. She could have chosen to open her practice in the city and no doubt charged higher fees. Her answer was that she wanted to live in a place where her kids could grow up in a better environment and where even though she was earning less, she HAD more.

Interestingly, her husband (they emigrated together from China) has just finished getting a degree in Agriculture from the University of Guelph and is now actively working the farm they bought outside of town.

These are immigrants who have looked at things from a different perspective and while I am sure it was not easy for any of them, they didn't assume they should get a job in the city. They obviously had other priorities that they looked for besides money. And in fact, they probably have more disposable income than their contemporaries in the city anyway.

Partially discharged

Sprawl..Orangeville?

https://goo.gl/maps/UYNqVJwBU8U2

All kidding aside, the main street in Orangeville (Broadway) is quite pleasant and on a clear day you can look SE to the brown line of smog that is Toronto.

Kleinburg, Concord, Woodbridge, Maple etc are all places where espresso is consumed more than 'canadian coffee', people suddenly take a lot of interest in the World Cup every 4 years and wear Azzurri blue shirts and lots of homes are owned and built by the land development industry of the GTA.

dbd33

Scroll south. Fields. Gravel pits. Green. It's probably five miles before you get to Brampton, after which it's continuous concrete until the lake. Or, to the east, to Scarborough, which, incidentally, Reeders has mistaken for the Beach.

On the Beach tangent, there's someone over the partition from me who, by chance, lives in the Beach, one street over from where I did. I've just advised him that he's a property millionaire, probably multimillionaire. He seems quite jaundiced about it "I know, I get the property tax bill. It didn't make the windows fit any better". Subsidence, basement flooding, insubstantial construction by the individual house owners, lack of parking, are joys of that, always fashionable, area.

I'm not denying that Orangeville has horrible subdivisions, just claiming that there's a gap between them and Toronto. It's the most commutable place to the airport that can be plausibly claimed not to be part of Toronto. You can, btw, see the CNN Tower from the brow of the hill before you start the descent to Brampton.

BristolUK

Like when some developers offer a fortune for the one house left in the street where a determined owner refuses to sell.

I'd accept anything that would set me up nicely somewhere else.

dbd33

The street in Mississauga where we had a house in now all McMansions except for one bungalow which was next to ours. The owner has been consistent in his selling price for years, $2,000,000. He was saying 2 million when houses on the street went for $600,000 (for demolition). "No one will pay that" I said once. "Not now" he said. Plainly he's happy where he is and has no need to move. He was, perhaps is, btw, a National Sales Manager.

I see him about annually and he reports on the latest offers, "over halfway there" was the story last year.

Reeders

I hardly think I have mistaken Scarborough for the Beach dbd33, you're getting a bit carried away with yourself. Don't be ridiculous and try to tell me I didn't live in the Beach for 15 years or know where it is having grown up in Toronto. If you want to hair split boundary lines, even that is stupid since Scarborough no longer exists as an entity and the Beach never had a legal boundary, it's a neighbourhood, not a town. Neighbourhoods don't have defined boundaries, they have commonly accepted boundaries. In the case of the Beach those traditionally were Woodbine, Kingston Road and Fallingbrook. And please don't bother trying to tell me there is a Riding boundary. That is a totally arbitrary set of lines drawn for convenience. They don't define anything other than what riding someone is voting in. Coxwell to Woodbine was never in the Beach, all that was there was a racetrack. Now it's wall to wall townhouses but they still aren't in the Beach, however much they want to say they are. It is in the riding though. Wooeee.

I really don't know what kind of point you were trying to make other than perhaps suggest that I had got it wrong and that somehow that was meaningful. What is it with some people here wanting to try and nit pick little things out of context rather than discussing the overall concepts? Forget the tree in front of your face and talk about the forest.

What I wrote was that if someone does not have to or want to live in a city, they should not assume that they do have to do so. If someone is able to choose not to work in a city, they do not have to live in a city. There is a shortage of skills all over Canada, so why only think of moving to Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, etc. when you can as easily move to somewhere smaller where you are still likely to find a job and can live better for less money.

Does everyone here who is living in a city or suburb really feel it necessary to defend their choice and attack any comment that suggests someone might want to think about living elsewhere?

Take a look at this list and see where the place you have chosen to live in ranks. Toronto is 43 and Vancouver 48.
Best Places for New Canadians 2017: Top 100 - MoneySense
What's more, they only list places that are designated as cities by population, so no small towns are listed at all.

The carpenter who did some work on our house last week may make a dollar or two less an hour than his contemporaries in the city can demand but he is no less busy and breathes fresh air every day. If someone wants to be a stockbroker than they have little choice as to where they can find work but for those who do have a choice and come here looking for advice, all I am suggesting is that you let them know they do have a choice, they don't have to assume it has to be a big city.