I'm much more familiar with Vancouver 15 years ago than I am with Vancouver now, but at the time the market was being inflated by the externalities of Hong Kong's reabsorption. I would suspect that Vancouver has a lot of the same Chinese mad money that San Fran and Los Angeles have, where you've got Chinese rich shipping money off shore into investments that are protected from the vagueries of a command economy.

But I don't think it'll deflate as quickly as it inflated. Vancouver has the same geographical issues as San Francisco - it's on a spit, bounded by water, with limited access points. There will always be heightened demand for locations in close.

You'll lose the drive for multi-family, by the way. San Francisco lost. Seattle lost. And both of these are so much worse than Vancouver. You drive into Vancouver from the south and it's a gleaming bauble of tinted curtainwall. You drive into San Francisco and it's still row houses.

And it could be argued that the high salaries of internet startups that don't actually produce value are contributing to the problem. If Hootsuite had to pay its employees what it can earn from its services, rather than what it can gain from ridiculous overvalued IPOs, outfits like Hootsuite might not be driving $2000/mo 1br condos in the downtown core.