Just wait a bit and see what happens in the housing market. I'm not saying it's ready for a crash, but sometimes renting for a year means everything will change. You can rent in a small town (cheap) or just stay where you are at for a while.
Everyone is thinking like you during the pandemic when remote work was the norm. That pushed up housing prices in weird places, like Boise, and other places like Sedona. Places that are small, typically tourist places, but very nice and pretty. The lack of housing has pushed up prices to ridiculous levels, but once the market corrects, it'll be a different world.
It's a bit of a fool's errand to follow that advice though, you could have been doing renting in urban Canada for years (decades even?) being told a crash is coming any day now eh has too. And now it's extremely unlikely that one would wipe out the compounded growth from if you'd bought when you first thought of it.
I think if it's to live in, just do it. Save market-timing for a second home/investment/flip - and even then be opportunistic in an observed dip rather than waiting for it to happen.
I'm not Canadian or particularly familiar, but that's 30% down having done something like 300% since 2009 right? So if you've been renting for the last 13 years waiting this to pounce, you're hardly going to be patting yourself on the back thinking it was such a smart move.
Unless you mean having bought there 4m ago would suck? Well, sure, but this 'advice' is only for a home, where you live, not an investment property. And as for looking right now vs. waiting short-term for prices to drop (and paying rent meanwhile) - that's surely priced in. Suppose it could still make sense to someone personally if it put them in a better mortgage position (at the risk of a worse rate).
I think if it's to live in, AND you can afford it AND it makes sense financially on a fixed rate mortgage, go for it. You are absolutely right on market timing, but that doesn't mean it'll go up forever, but over time, it does seem to generally go up a bit. But it's not really an investment, its a place to live, so don't pay so much on a mortgage that you are risking your financial health - think it should be about equal to rent or maybe a little more.
Just remember, turkeys think everything is great, until Halloween, when they get put in the freezers for Thanksgiving. If you look at the graph of their weight from birth to death it's always going up, so it should go up forever. But on Halloween it'll go down a bit, then level out forever. ;)
Everyone is thinking like you during the pandemic when remote work was the norm. That pushed up housing prices in weird places, like Boise, and other places like Sedona. Places that are small, typically tourist places, but very nice and pretty. The lack of housing has pushed up prices to ridiculous levels, but once the market corrects, it'll be a different world.