I'm by far no expert on this stuff, but one reason that buying can be useful is that if your house appreciates enough, you can use that appraised value combined with your equity to help you get a mortgage on second property to rent out (like a condo/townhouse investment). My brother does this and has his operating expenses covered on the second home all the while it is appreciating in value. Another thing would be to buy a home that you could rent out a portion of it (like a basement) to help fund the mortgage.
One way to build some equity could be to continue living in Brampton and buy a place and rent it out - then someone else is paying down your mortgage for you - if you could afford to do that. We own and rent out a condo downtown Toronto using this idea which will be paid off in 9 years and will be a good thing for us to have down the road.
On the subject of rising house values, we bought our house 2 years ago in west Mississauga and similar houses in our neighbourhood have recently sold for about $150k more than we paid for ours in only 2 years. That's staggering and I'm not sure I could afford to buy my own house right now.
The hardest thing of the current market is that for most, they can not save money equal or greater to the rate of housing appreciation - so the prospect of home ownership becomes more difficult as time goes on.
Lastly - if you have not seen this before, it can help you get a sense of the current prices homes are being sold for all across the GTA. You can sign up for an email blast that comes once every few days, letting you know of all the 'sold' prices at Toronto Real Estate Solds: http://tosolds.ca/ The email blast has different links within it sorted by region (ex. Mississauga or Guelph etc). It also shows condos separately. The email links stay good for about 2 weeks and give you the opportunity to view each MLS listing for properties sold. This is a very useful tool.
