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If you can do research, you will find who is naive. Go to the MLS website, try to find houses which have price between a range, such as 350K - 400K, in Edmonton and Ottawa. Theses two cities almost have same average house price. You will find you can buy much nicer homes in Ottawa than in Edmonton. If you compare new home price between Toronto area and Edmonton area, you will find new home is more expensive in Edmonton whereas Toronto has much higher average home price. Don't trust statistics too much. Sometimes they didn't tell you truth. Why is Edmonton's average home price released by statistics so low? That's because most people can only buy low end, crappy houses, thus reflect low average home price. Actually Edmont's home price is almost caught up Calgary. Calgary's average price is higher than Edmonton's because there are more million dollar houses there, which only can be bought by executives in oil companies. If you compare same house, Edmonton is only very little lower. Now you can only buy 1600 sq ft new home with $420K in Edmonton. Which other cities in Canada you can find are so expensive? Probably only Vancouver and Calgary. I believe price will come down as houses are so unaffordable now. If oil price drops more, the mraket may crash.