I bought my Vancouver home for 1.1 million in 2011. It's now "worth 1.7m". Convert that to USD and it's only about 1.2m, a gain of maybe 10% over 5 years (USD and CAD were approximately at par in 2011 when I bought). If I had put my money into S&P500 instead, I'd be much wealthier. (If I had bought with cash, it'd be worth about 3.2 million CAD, excluding dividends.) And I'm not even counting the property taxes, maintenance, mortgage interest, etc which would add up to essentially what I would have paid for rent.