Another Vancouverite here who will vouch for that being real. Like silverpig said many of these houses have been owned outright for a long time. Vancouver has now become one of THE cities to live in. It often comes out #1 or close to it on lists of the most desirable city to live in the world over. It's a beautiful city with a lot going for it. Given this it's not all that surprising that housing prices have just gone up up up. And like silverpig mentioned much of this money is coming in from overseas. There is a huge Asian community here with big money from Hong Kong and Taiwan and many other places. Like everyone is saying it's the land that is valued at these prices not those houses. All over the city you see lots of neighbourhoods that are all 1950s style bungalows or ranchers all worth over a million. These houses have almost all been owned by people for well over 20 years or more. See if you have kept property here since the late 1980s then you got lucky. My family here doesn't quite have the money for a detached house, we live in a town house, but we too have gotten rather lucky. This gives you an idea of how things went:
We moved here from China and Malaysia (traveling for 4 years) and bought a small townhouse for $107,000 in 1988. That was about an average price for a townhouse back then. We lived in that house for 10 years and sold it in 1998 for $254,000. We used that and a little bit more money to get our current townhose which we bought in 1998 for $370,000. Last time I checked this townhouse is now worth about 790-$800,000. Again if we were to sell it now that's not enough to buy most detached homes in this area. All are above 1 mil or more.
Unfortunately this does make it quite difficult for those of us who have lived in this city for most of our lives but never owned any property ourselves. These prices are way out of our reach for the most part. You aren't going to be able to afford a million dollar property on a $30-$40,000 per year job. Because of this most of the younger generation live either in apartments or they go out farther from the city to buy. So far we don't have a huge urban sprawl situation but it is getting worse, though thankfully the fact that we are surrounded by mountains at least somewhat limits how far the sprawl could go. The city centre is also pretty damn dense with high rise apartments that aren't too too badly priced in some cases.