After a few months of large increases, the value of residential building permits in the Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) fell sharply to $373 million in November 2014, a drop of nearly 32 per cent compared with November 2013, according to Statistics Canada data released January 9.
The value of residential building permits across BC fell to $602 million in November 2014, a drop of nearly 16 per cent compared with November 2013.
The declines in BC and Vancouver were driven by a fall in value of permits issued for row homes and condos, as single-family home permits rose by 22 per cent and 35 per cent year over year for BC and Vancouver respectively.
The total value of residential building permits in Abbotsford-Mission in November fell 36.9 per cent year over year to $6.9 million.
Nationwide, residential permits in November 2014 were valued at just under $4.4 billion – a rise of nearly 6 per cent.
The figures were released on the same day that Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) announced housing starts in the Vancouver CMA were trending at 20,030 units in December – an unexpected monthly increase compared with 19,511 units in November.
“The trend measure of housing starts moved higher in December due to small increases in construction of all types of homes except town houses,” said Robyn Adamache, CMHC’s senior market analyst.
For the whole of 2014, the actual number of Vancouver housing starts totalled 19,212 units, a slight increase over the previous year. Construction of single-family detached homes accounted for most of this increase and was concentrated in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey and Vancouver, reported the CMHC.
Housing starts in the Abbotsford-Mission CMA were trending at 475 units in December, up from 431 units in November.
Across Canada, however, housing starts were trending at 192,047 units in December, a small decrease compared with 194,807 in November.
“The modest decline in the trend in December reflected lower levels of both multiple and single-detached starts,” said Bob Dugan, CMHC’s chief economist. “Overall, activity in 2014 continued to be supported by employment growth and migration with starts remaining essentially unchanged at 189,401 compared with 187,923 in 2013. These factors are expected to continue to promote stability in the pace of new home construction during 2015.”
CMHC said 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.
