In the Raleigh Love it or list it, there is this dark-haired middle-aged British-born woman who does the renovations and a guy who is the estate agent. They have a very high over-representation of gay couples as clients.

Raleigh, North Carolina, has a population of about half a million (a million or so in the urban area) and it is the state capital near the Atlantic coast roughly in the norternmost part of the South. It's a bit smaller than Helsinki but in the same size category. It has a very high population growth rate. It's in the so-called Research Triangle made up by North Carolina State University, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Duke University is well-known and I thought it was an Ivy League university until I checked and found out it wasn't.

Given that background, the cost of housing in Raleigh, NC, and the rest of Durham County is quite reasonable. The show has beautiful, very spaceous and relatively new houses on the market for $300,000-$400,000 only 30-50 minutes from downtown Raleigh. The high growth rate of the city does not surprise me at all. The climate is warm temperate with short winters with only occasional snow and long hot summers.

I've visited Vancouver, BC. A great uncle of mine and two generations of his descendants live there (some have moved elsewhere). It is a very attractive place but the housing market makes it completely hopeless for young people to ever become homeowners unless they can get very significant help from their parents. The inflated house prices are caused by mainly rich Chinese and Taiwanese speculators buying up property there. We bought our house for less than €300,000 but I'm pretty sure that if it were located in Vancouver, BC, the current market price for it would've been over a million.