Housing starts in Metro Vancouver continued their month-over-month rise as spring heated up, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) report published May 8.
Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) housing starts were trending at 19,784 units in April compared with 18,206 units in March, said the report. The trend is a six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts.
“The start of several large new condominium apartment projects in the cities of Burnaby, Surrey and Vancouver, along with increased construction of single-detached homes, propelled the trend measure of starts above last month’s total,” said Robyn Adamache, principal, market analysis at CMHC.
The report was issued one day after Statistic Canada reported that building permits in Vancouver increased in value by 97 per cent year over year and 52 per cent over the previous month.
Housing starts in the Abbotsford-Mission CMA were trending at 550 units in April, up from 407 units in March.
However, the trend measure of housing starts across Canada increased only incrementally, to 179,299 units in April compared with 179,114 in March, said the CMHC.
“Elevated levels of multi-unit starts during mid-2014 caused the trend to peak in September. Starts activity since then has trended down to current stable levels as builders have adjusted activity to manage inventories,” said Bob Dugan, chief economist at CMHC’s Market Analysis Centre. “This trend is in line with CMHC’s expectations for housing starts in 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.
