Housing starts in Metro Vancouver continued to rise in August, with the increases the steepest in condo-apartment construction, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) report released September 9.
Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) housing starts were trending at 22,421 units last month compared with 21,860 units in July. The trend is a six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts.
“While single-detached starts trended lower, multi-family starts increased to their highest level since the fall of 2012,” said Richard Sam, CMHC’s principal market analyst for Vancouver.
“Builders continued to develop higher-density projects to meet rising buyer demand in the resale market.”
In the Abbotsford-Mission CMA, however, housing starts were trending at 578 units in August, down from 655 in July.
Across Canada, the trend measure of housing starts was 196,565 units in August, compared with 185,642 the previous month.
Bob Dugan, CMHC’s chief economist, said, “Housing starts have been trending up, supported by strong condominium activity in Toronto. This is in line with CMHC’s most recent forecasts that would see demand shift from new higher-priced single-detached homes towards lower-priced alternatives.
“While national starts have increased, housing construction has started to slow in Alberta and Saskatchewan as a result of weakening economic conditions related to the decline of oil prices.”
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.
