Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) housing starts continued to rise last month, trending at 25,969 units in March compared to 24,248 units in February, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) report published April 8.
The trend is a six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts.
“An increase in single-detached, townhome and apartment starts saw the pace of new home construction surpass last month’s trend,” said Richard Sam, CMHC’s principal market analyst for Vancouver.
“Record monthly resales and low inventories of new move-in ready homes have motivated builders to bring on more supply to the marketplace.”
Housing starts in the Abbotsford-Mission CMA were trending at 1,265 units in March, down from 1,408 units in February, which the CMHC said caused by a decrease in apartment starts.
The increased housing starts in Vancouver and British Columbia as a whole was in contrast to the national picture. Across Canada, the trend measure of housing starts was 196,783 units in March, down from 201,618 in February.
“Overall, starts were trending lower in March due to a slowdown in multi-unit construction,” said Bob Dugan, CMHC chief economist. “This was the case across the country, except in British Columbia where declining inventories of new and unsold units as well as low levels of new listings in the resale market spurred builders to start new projects.”
CMHC pointed out that it uses six-month moving averages to account for considerable swings in monthly estimates and obtain a more complete picture of the state of the housing market. In some situations, said the CMHC, analyzing only the monthly seasonally adjusted data can be misleading in some markets, as they can be variable from one month to the next.
Building Permits
The CMHC’s housing starts figures were issued the day after Statistics Canada published its monthly home building permit values data April 7.
Residential construction permits issued in Vancouver in February 2016 were valued at a total of less than $346million, a drop of more than20 per cent compared with the previous February, according to the statistics agency, and a decline of 6.5 per cent since January this year.
This is the second consecutive monthly drop in building permit values issued in the city, despite the dearth of housing stock pushing up home prices dramatically.
This drop was driven entirely by an unexpected halving in the value of condo-apartment building permits issued, which plummeted 55 per cent year over year to total value of $118.8million in February.
Vancouver’s detached homes permits totalled nearly $140million in February, and nearly $62 million worth of issued permits were for townhomes and row homes – both up year over year.
Residential permits across BC in February were down 6.2 per cent year over year to $534.2million in value, although this was a rise of four per cent compared with January.
In other BC cities, Abbotsford-Mission’s lower and therefore more volatile building permit values increased 68.6 per cent year-over-year to $7.6million, a drop of 21.1 per cent from January’s $9.6million.
Unlike last month, Victoria this week bucked Vancouver’s trend, with its $57 million in permit values a rise of 64.5 year over year and 79.6 month over month.
Home building permit values in Kelowna rose even more sharply year over year, up 74.5 per cent since last February, but dropped 35.2 per cent since January, to total $14.2 million worth of permits issued.
Across Canada, the value of permits issued was nearly $2.5 billion, a 6.7 per cent decline compared with the same month last year but a 12.6 per cent increase since January.
View Statistics Canada’s interactive charts here.
