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My wife and I are back in the real estate market. We're looking for a place with a separate suite so my dad can come live with us part time. I'm keen on the plan, but buying real estate is not my idea of fun.

I may be the only Vancouverite who feels this way. Real estate is huge entertainment out here, swamping the movie industry by many orders of magnitude in the way it grips the public imagination.

Recent statistics out of Royal Bank of Canada confirm my impression. We devote a freakishly high percentage of our annual income to the honour of having our own drain tiles to replace and chimney flumes to unclog - 69.3 per cent to be precise, more than 1½ times the national average.

International interest in Vancouver, and the real estate investment that has followed, has played a role in the city's housing boom. But we're riveted by our own real estate, too. I've been to more open houses now than I care to admit and I'm convinced half the people milling through the rooms and hallways are there purely for the amusement value.

You can spot these recreational bull market watchers easily enough. Unlike us buyers, they don't look like they're suppressing a massive anxiety attack. They stand outside the bathrooms discussing tiles. They critique the location of the kitchen island. They throw price per square foot data back and forth like baseball fans trading slugging averages.

Like all aficionados, they also live within a celebrity matrix brought to life by their own fixations. And they all bow to the demigods they have made.

Chief among these is the person who has demonstrably purchased well. I know a guy who bought his place on Crown a full year before the explosion of real estate in the previously sleepy neighbourhood of Point Grey. Now he emits a new energy, power and serenity co-mingled - sort of George Clooney halfway morphed to Gandhi.

Brokers, too, ride a bull in status during these times. Scan the room at a busy open house. Find the person sitting sagely at the corner of the leather sectional reading The Wall Street Journal. Cole Haan loafers. Eight-hundred-dollar eyeglass frames. An assistant to answer questions. That would be your neighbourhood Re/Max agent.

Of course, as with all celebritocracies, avid participation in real estate can deliver up a faintly burnt back flavour too. A sense that really, truth be told, you're being royally conned.

Nothing captures this more for me than the upward spiral of prices that renders the value of any given structure irrelevant. For most new buyers, the house is paramount. Land is a thing traded by barons, people who already have a house, or maybe more than one. But as prices have shot up, even to stratospheric levels, most of what you're looking at is land value.

This understood buying of crap-on-a-lot informs open houses. Nobody blinks on the West Side that the price tag is seven figures and the floors are radically sloping in four different directions.

I went down into the basement of a "charming character house" in Kitsilano recently and there was a guy with a tape measure. He was calling out measurements to a friend taking notes. "Yeah, it's 6 feet 6 inches over here and ... about six even down this end."

I pulled back a suspicious looking curtain in the corner of the unfinished basement. There was a toilet on a raised wooden dais. No sink. No walls. A million bucks and that was the third bathroom.

Some people say it's all going to crash. According to those RBC numbers, the average Vancouver family really couldn't pay any more of their income toward housing costs without starting to eat less. Others point out that the job market is still tight and economic growth in Canada is hanging in there.

Personally, I find myself more interested in how long the cultural fixation on real estate can last. And to judge that, I think we need new statistics.

The first would be a real estate preoccupation sustainability index. Get this number for yourself by dividing the hours each week you spend browsing real estate listings by those spent brushing your teeth. A score higher than two and you need a new hobby.

The second stat we need is a real estate agent celebrity sustainability index. This would be derived from the ratio of a real estate agent's car value to the average value of all the buyers' cars at any given open house. If the agent is driving a Mercedes-Benz SLK 500, for example, and the other cars present are a BMW 3 series, a Volkswagen Jetta, a rusting Ford Granada and three mountain bikes (various makes), you can be sure all of the buyers present will be out of the market in three months.

The last, and arguably most important, statistic we should have is what I like to think of as the personal humiliation sustainability index. This number would be derived by dividing the value of the house itself by the tax assessed value of the house and property. The crazier the market, the tinier this number becomes, as the structure itself, the thing you were planning to live in, disappears into financial irrelevance.

To illustrate, I went to see a place recently and the agent proudly showed me the tax assessment proving the value of the land. Looking over his shoulder, however, that allowed me to value the actual physical structure at about 9 per cent of the asking price. He was selling dirt, folks. A few metres of turf and a rhododendron. And he was smiling.

Under which circumstances, I'm forced to devote my attention in this column to on base percentages for the remainder of this year.

Timothy Taylor is a novelist and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest novel is Story House.

ltaylor@globeandmail.com