Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary have been ranked as the three best places out of 50 cities around the world in terms of where best to invest in real estate for the long term, according to real estate firm, UK based Grosvenor Group.

This ranking doesn't come so much from short-term metrics like ROI, but their longer term "resilience" - a combination of "low vulnerability and high adaptive capacity," says the report, more than three years in the making.

Adding to that all three Canadian cities have a "high level of resource availability" and "are well governed and well planned." In fact, they beat London, New York and even Chicago, ranked as No. 4, for their strong investment potential over the coming decades.

The research team focused on 10 parameters, from climate to governance, to planning, technology/learning, funding and "community" - access to affordable housing, education, health care, religious and cultural freedom, honest government and "reasonably crime-free living conditions."

Despite talk about a Canadian housing bubble, concerns about condo overbuilding and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's ongoing extracurricular activities,  and while Toronto house prices continue to climb out of sight, they still lag well behind cities like London, which came in 18th in the resiliency rankings, in part because it's now so prohibitively expensive.

A full copy of the report is available on the Grosvenor website by clicking here.

The focus of this issue is on cross border work with Canada and our specific legal support services for Trowbridge International who purchased a commercial property in downtown Toronto but required specific legal advice for their UK sister company providing cross guarantees to the lending bank. We are looking to assist additional Canadian companies purchasing commercial property both here in the UK and closer to home.