Hi,

I posted a few weeks back about living in Toronto nice suburbs to live in, cost of living etc?

Looks like after further research there is more work for my wife in vancouver so the debate begins.....

Where are the nice suburbs is vancouver region where could could buy a family 3 bed home for say CAD $282000 - 438900 and say max 30km outside of Down Town?

Whats the cost of living like in vancouver compared to Toronto?

Where has the better summers and worst winters? (from what I have read Toronto has best summers and vancouver winters are worse)

When I first started to think about moving to Canada I didn't think it was possible there would be many places to be more expensive to live in than the UK......from my research so far it would appear Canada might just be one of those places!!

Thanks for the help in advance

Shome mistake, surely?

you can compare climate stats here

http://www.climatetemp.info/canada/v...-columbia.html

comparing van-to, van looks wetter/damper and TO looks colder in the winter (lake effect snow etc) and hotter in the summer

......sounds about right from the CanadaAM weather forecasts over the last year

A bit more on comparing the two climates:

Vancouver's Climate
Toronto's Climate

Apologies I have been fed duff info........on that one. Thanks for all the posts so far

Next, the cost of houses. Based solely on posts here I think you're kidding yourself, you need Lots More Money.

Here you go, all you ever needed to know and then some about Vancouver and Toronto weather.

On the left where each of the two cities rank in each weather topic, on the right the table ranked from 1-100 for each of the topics clicked on in the left panel.

Take a look HERE for an idea on house prices in the Greater Vancouver area. I think you'll find you'll need a much larger budget if you want to buy withing 30km of Van. If you don't mind living in a crappy area, then you may just get something within your budget! BC = Bring Cash..... it's expensive!

Of course, what makes a "nice" suburb is subjective. If you are looking for a single family (detached) home then your budget is going to limit you quite a bit. I did a search on the MLS for homes in Surrey between $300,000 and $450,000 and it came up with 25 + pages. Not all of these were in areas I would want to live in, but some are.

A friend of mine lives in a pleasant subdivision near Cloverdale in Surrey. Four bedrooms and three bathrooms, and a total of 2,700 sf living space. He has just completed renovating so the house has a finished basement, hardwood floors, granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances - all the bling people expect. It was appraised at $435,000 a couple of months ago. However, to get this you give up anything more than a postage stamp size yard.

You are on your 30km limit here (maybe a bit over). Transit options for commuting downtown are limited. It is not impossible but you'll probably drive if you have parking at work, or drive to a park and ride station. The new Port Mann bridge should be finished in a year or so and, although this will be tolled, will make the drive into Vancouver much more bearable.

Would you consider a townhouse (an attached, often terraced house)? If so, $400,000 - $450,000 is a fairly decent budget and it will give you a lot more flexibility in choosing a neighborhood.

Real-estate aside I can't imagine there is much difference.

There is a lot on climate above. It depends on what you like. I prefer the generally moderate climate of Vancouver.

When we first came to Vancouver everything, excluding car insurance and alcohol, seemed to be cheap as chips. That included housing. That was in the days of 2.35 dollars to the pound. I guess things are 30% more expensive now.

PS. Is there a reason why you capitalize Toronto, but not vancouver?

There are lots of subdivisions like this around. When I was looking last year there were loads of places around 3000sqft on lots where the house pretty much took up the entire space. I guess it cuts down on gardening - but where do you sit with a G&T in the summer?

if you're open to a townhouse/condo rather than house you have lots of options of areas to live in. A lot of townhouses are bigger than detached houses.

I don't venture out of the city very much, but I had the misfortune of going to the suburbs last week and I noticed that the sub-divisonary houses were dominated by massive garages. How many cars do they have? It made all the houses look very ugly and disproportionate. It was a soulless experience, everywhere looked like Crawley. I don't think I'll be going back any time soon.

They used to be called Fire Hall homes, but I guess they are so common now they don't need a name. Everyone has a car/truck in suburbia. You need somewhere to keep them.

My garage door is on the side. It's big though; I cleaned it out the other day and found that the previous owner had left a bag of birdseed in one of the cupboards. Needless to say I wasn't the first to make this discovery as it contained a number of mice both living and dead. The live ones scampered off into various mouse sized hiding places that you get in garages. Even though I only saw one or two do this, I've caught four of the cute but dirty little buggers in traps since. One thing I've learned from this is that mice really do like cheese.

For that budget forget about Single family homes (SFH). Even the roughest crack shack in the Valley is going to be at the top end of your budget. Where I live (coquitlam - about 25km to downtown), there are next to no SFH's (nothing decent) for under 500k. If your wife needs to commute to downtown Vancouver, then consider townhomes. A reasonable 3 bedroom townhome in a decent suburb might be 350k-400k.

Can't compare cost of living to toronto for you, but it isn't cheap living here. Obviously current exchange rates make things seem more expensive in comparison in pound sterling terms, than in reality when you're earning dollars. But whichever way you look at it, the cost of living (even without housing) has increased markedly over the last decade. A gross income of about 6-7k pm would provide the basics.

I think the weather for Van was nicely summed up by james.mc. Winters are horrendously depressing (but you can ski if you wish), but there's usually a decent run of good weather in summer (particularly later on - Jul/Aug)