You would probably find fairly good agreement that houses in the Vancouver area sold for about $10,000 in the mid - 1950's, say 1955,  but had increased to around $100,000 for average starter homes by 1980. That's a 10 fold increase in 25 years, or put another way, an average compounded increase of about 9.6% per year over that timespan.  Even so, unadjusted Vancouver median incomes peaked at $24,315 in 1980, also in 1980 dollars, so a house was about 4 times median income then.  A point to note is that mortgage rates were at 15% also in 1980, versus about 3% nowadays. At that time, a 15%,  25 year amortization, 25% down mortgage on a $100,000 house was $1243 per month, but would have been $663 at 3%.  The difference equates to an effective 8 times income relative to now, which is better than the current 14 times, but Vancouver didn't have the international cachet that it now does.  The same analysis on a more prosaic city ( Winnipeg) would show less of a rise.