New home construction starts starts fell in Metro Vancouver in January, but remained high for the typically slow month, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) figures released February 8.
Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) new home construction starts were trending at 20,790 units in January 2016 compared with 21,659 units in December 2015. The trend is a six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts.
“Despite an increase in single-detached starts, Vancouver saw a decrease in multi-unit construction, prompting housing starts to trend lower in the region compared with last month,” said Richard Sam, CMHC’s principal market analyst for Vancouver.
“Despite the downward trend, actual housing starts in the CMA surpassed what is usually expected for January, figuring above the 10-year historical average for actual starts during the month.”
Housing starts in the Abbotsford-Mission CMA bucked the trend, seeing a month-over-month increase in January at 1,204 units, up from 1,024 units in December 2015.
The trend measure of housing starts across the whole of Canada also fell, to 199,169 units in January compared with 203,304 in December.
“Housing starts trended down across the country with the exception of Ontario,” said Bob Dugan, CMHC chief economist.
“The overall decline is mostly attributable to a slowdown in the Prairies where the housing starts trend was at a four-year low in January. The slowdown in new housing activity coincides with an unemployment rate that is at a five-year high in Alberta”.
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.
The CMHC’s housing starts data was released as Statistics Canada published its monthly building permit figures February 8, which suggested the drop in local housing starts will not last for long, especially in the multi-family sector.
Vancouver home building permits issued in December 2015 were valued at a total of $558 million, a rise of 98 per cent compared with the previous December, according to the statistics agency.
This near-doubling of values was led by another leap in condo-apartment building permits, which soared 171 per cent year over year to $376 million.
Single-family homes made up just shy of $114 million of December’s permit value in Vancouver, and $63 million was invested in townhomes and row homes.
Vancouver’s total dollar value in December was also a 2.6 per cent month-over-month increase compared with November 2015’s figure of $544 million.
Residential permits across BC in December were up 72.3 per cent year over year to $781 million in value, which was a strong increase of 8.8 per cent compared with November.
