"Past performance is no guarantee of future results"
The housing market can only grow as far as people are willing and able to pay for. Sure, you may have a few international investors distorting the picture, but for the wider masses of homes you still need a strong local base to prop up the average price.
My impression is that in Toronto, we went from a market that's affordable enough for lower-to-mid-income households to a market that's only affordable to high-income households. Apparently there are still enough people to finance this. But with another doubling of prices vs. salaries, I feel like even high earners wouldn't be able to buy in en masse, and that's where there's a limit to price growth. Not sure about the exact number, but we're probably not far off from it at this point.
There's also the issue with interest rates, which may be able to fall a little further and dip into negative territory when the next regression comes, but we probably won't be able to replicate the decrease in rates over the last 10 to 30 years. And lower rates are really what drove up housing prices in the recent past.
Of course, if companies start to approach Bay Area salaries, we'll raise the price growth limit as well. Personally, I don't worry too much about housing options for software developers and more about the gap between us and the low-wage retail, restaurant, underpaid or underemployed rest of the city. Who cares about home ownership when your friends are moving back to their parents in the prairies.
