As Vancouver home prices continue to soar, some parents are ensuring their school-aged children and toddlers won't one day be priced out of the city.
Parents and grandparents are purchasing properties with their young children in mind, and renting the homes out until the youngsters are ready to move in – which in some cases will be decades from now.
Kristine Skinner, a financial adviser with BlueShore Financial, has helped five of her clients purchase condos for their school-aged children this year alone.
"They are people who live in the city. They are people who want to stay in the city, and they're people who want their children to remain local as well," Skinner told CTV Vancouver on Monday.
Purchasing property in Vancouver is becoming a seemingly impossible task, as home prices continue to soar.
According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, Greater Vancouver saw a in May. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, meanwhile, said May marked another record-breaking month for housing sales in the region, as the benchmark price for a detached home increased to .
Business owner Les Robertson said he can't afford a home in Vancouver, and he doubts his six-month-old daughter Amelia will be able to do so decades from now.
"It's just not going to get any better for her at all," Robertson said.
So Amelia's grandmother recently bought a home that sits on a subdivided lot in the city, with the intention of having her granddaughter one day move onto the property.
"We're just waiting for the property value to go up enough to split (it)," Robertson explained.
Tom Davidoff, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business, said this type of real estate strategy could ensure young Vancouverites won't be priced out of the housing market.
"If my family has been in Vancouver for a long time, and the next generation must have a home here, then I think eliminating the risk of the children being priced out could be a sensible strategy," he said.
But concerns around a potential correction in Vancouver's housing market has some real estate experts questioning whether buying property in the city is the safest investment.
"It says to me that people think the values (in the housing market) are going to continue to climb, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. Certainly not in cities like Vancouver and Toronto," John Andrew, executive director of Queen's University Real Estate Roundtable, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Channel on Tuesday. "I think Vancouver is at a significant risk for a correction."
Andrew said it's likely that only the "top 0.1 per cent" of parents in Vancouver are in a position to even consider buying property for their young children.
"Most people are very fortunate if they buy a single family home at all in a market like that, let alone a second one," he said.
However, Andrew said those who have the resources to invest for their children are better off putting their money in a "well-diversified portfolio."
"I think you're going to be much further ahead 20 years down the road, than investing in a pretty volatile market like Vancouver."
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Shannon Paterson