The home you could buy in 8 Canadian cities for $1M

The home you could buy in 8 Canadian cities for $1M

What the Royal LePage report indicates is that today, if you want to buy a home with a million dollars, you’ll have to be picky about what city you want to live in — and how much space you’re comfortable giving up.

For over 30 years, the Barenaked Ladies have been making music that celebrates the Canadian experience. In 1988, they created a classic anthem in ‘If I Had a Million Dollars’. The song depicts an idyllic dream of a world where a million dollars could buy a house, a chesterfield, and an ottoman. But times have certainly changed since then.

In 2021, a million dollars is not quite enough to buy you a house, much less the amenities that the Barenaked Ladies sang about. According to a report from brokerage Royal LePage released Thursday, a million dollars will get you approximately 3.2 bedrooms, 2.6 baths and 1,763 square feet of living space in the average Canadian home. However, in the core of Canada’s biggest cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, a million dollars will get you a lot less space; in Vancouver, for example, a million dollars will buy you an average of 1.9 bedrooms and 2.8 baths amid under 1,000 square feet of space.

In fact, if you want to buy an above–average sized home in a major Canadian city, you will need to adjust for inflation. According to former Google engineer Ian Webster’s inflation calculator, a million dollars in 1988 works out to roughly $2.12 million of purchasing power in 2023.

Of course, the Royal LePage report also states that cities such as Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg offer average spaces that are larger than that of the major cities with more bedrooms and bathrooms. So if you’re looking for a house with a million dollars, you will have to be picky about which city you want to live in and how much space you’re comfortable giving up.

The Canadian housing market has seen a great deal of change since the Barenaked Ladies sang about their dream world. But the dream of a million–dollar house is still alive, albeit in a much different form than it was in 1988.