The Hongcouver | The HK$12m garage and other properties that prove Vancouver realty has lost the plot

Vancouver’s real estate listings provide an alternating source of horror and hilarity. Trying to get a housing toehold in the world’s second-most unaffordable city - according to Demographia’s* study of 378 cities around the world in nine major markets - where median housing prices are 10 times median household incomes, gives rise to a certain kind of gallows humour.

One manifestation of that has been the popular “Crack Shack or Mansion” website, which invites visitors to differentiate between dilapidated drug dens and Vancouver homes with million-dollar-plus price tags. It’s surprisingly tricky.

This listing in stylish Kitsilano, price C$1.775 million (HK$12 million), certainly looks promising. The main photo shows a grand stairway leading up to an imposing 1920s-style home. But no, that’s not for sale. It’s the one behind it. On the same lot. Where most people put the garage. Sure it’s listed as a “coach house”, but Melissa Carr, author of the terrific Vancouver lifestyle website The Thirties Grind isn’t buying it, pointing out that “coach house is fancy for garage”. “I’m not going to shell out nearly two million dollars just so that I can live like Mike Seaver did in Growing Pains…in the garage,” she says.