I bought my house in NY with a no down payment mortgage from the Veteran's Administration; I was in the United States Air Force for a while. Otherwise, I think I would have needed a 5% downpayment for an FHA mortgage. These are both American programs; don't know if Canada has anything similar.
I did live in your area of the world for 3 years: Tacoma, Washington. Housing there was expensive. A small house in decent area was going for more than $200000. And that was 4 years ago. So I'm assuming that something in Vancouver costs CA$300000. Which means that you probably need at least a $15000 down payment, plus a similar amount in closing costs. Until you have $30000, it's probably not worth looking.
The process itself was pretty noneventful. I found an agent, flew into town, looked at about 30 houses in a week, found one, made an offer, and flew home. It closed on time and everything was fine.
I do recommend that you buy the worst house in the best neighborhood if you can't afford something extravagant. Rochester, NY has negative population growth and an abysmal public school system. But it also has Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox. I bought in an upper-middle class suburb called Brighton, 10 minutes from downtown. I certainly didn't get the worst house, but there are million dollar homes within a mile of mine. The school system is nationally ranked: at face value I could care less because I don't ever intend to have children. I also paid 2-3X more than I would have paid to buy in the city. But then I decided that moving to New Zealand would be fun. I had 20 people come and view my house in less than 2 weeks when I decided to rent: mostly people who wanted the opportunity to send their kids to school in my district. I was able to rent at a rate that covered my my mortgage, taxes, and property management fees. The value of the house continues to go up; meanwhile I live on the other side of the world.
If I had purchased a less expensive house in a more affordable neighborhood, it would probably still be sitting vacant or unsold. And I would be stuck with the mortgage payment.
If you think that you will buy your house and live in it for a long time, the things I mentioned probably don't matter But if you later decide to rent or sell, they matter a great deal. So you should probably pass on the so-called bargain in a questionable neighborhood.
