In Vancouver, property pays better than stocks or bonds

Vancouver

IN the spring of 2012, Dustan Woodhouse, then a 40-year-old Vancouver mortgage broker, broke the cardinal rule of saving for retirement: he liquidated his retirement fund, took the tax hit and ploughed the rest into the local real estate market.

"People told me I was crazy," says Mr Woodhouse, 45, whose plan is to buy and have paid off 10 such investments by his late sixties. "But that's our pension - that's what that property is."

Maybe not as crazy as it sounds. Vancouver is among a clutch of cosmopolitan, attractive cities around the globe where the appreciation in home prices is seemingly unstoppable.

New-home prices have gained 5 per cent since March, the biggest three-month increase since 1990, data releas…