There are still people out there who don’t believe Canada is about to be hit by a devastating housing crisis, but Riaz Kassam isn’t one of them. For him, the crisis has already arrived.

Last July, he made an $80,000 pre-sale payment on a $1.5-million penthouse condominium in Vancouver’s tony H&H Yaletown building, just a few blocks away from where he lives. Kassam, a 42-year-old computer analyst, who’s married with no kids, expected to move in by the end of 2008. But when he put his current apartment on the market, he didn’t get a single offer. He thought maybe he had priced it a little high, so he knocked a bit off. Still, no offers. He lowered it again, and again, until eventually he was offering his apartment for a full $120,000 less than his initial asking price. That’s when he realized he was in trouble. “We reached the point where we couldn’t drop the price any more,” he says, “or we wouldn’t have enough for the down payment on the new property.”

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