Latest housing data: completions, housing starts, building permits

Building permit values in BC down 40% year-over-year

Globe and Mail, August 2024

How are we doing on homebuilding? There’s a pipeline:

• Housing completions count new housing that’s finished.

• Housing starts count new housing that’s under construction.

• Building permit values are a measure of future construction.

Housing completions in the city of Vancouver, compared to provincial targets set a year ago: Vancouver Falls Short Of Provincial Housing Completions Target After Year One. Howard Chai, Storeys. The target was 5200 completions; actual completions were about 4100, or roughly 80%. The city’s set its own 10-year target at 83,000 homes, or about 8,300 homes per year - higher than the provincial target, but only about half of the city’s own estimate of the number of homes needed (167,000).

According to a City of Vancouver report, Vancouver has fallen short of the 5,202 target for the first year, which ended on September 30. The total net new completed units in this first year was 4,143 — 79.6% of the target. The result may not come as a surprise, however, as a City report earlier this year found that it was on pace to miss the first-year target.

In addition to the net targets, the Province's housing target orders also provide recommendations — numbers to strive for, not requirements — on the breakdown of those housing units, including by tenure, size, and affordability.

The city report says that they expect 15,300 net new units to be completed in the next two years, for a total of about 19,000 completions in the first three years. That’ll be more than enough to meet the province’s targets (about 16,000 completions in the first three years), but not the city’s own targets (about 24,000).

The city report includes a summary of policies recently completed or under way to allow more housing. I didn’t see any mention of municipal development charges, which set a floor on prices and rents. At the regional level, MVRD is planning to increase its charges over the next three years, pushing more projects underwater.

Latest news on housing starts as of October 2024, summarized by Rishi Sondi at TD: Canada-wide housing starts are up, BC housing starts are flat.

• Canadian housing starts came in at 241k annualized units in October, representing an 8% month-on-month (m/m) increase from September.

• Urban starts were higher in 7 of 10 provinces: The Prairies (+9.3k to 64.7k units) accounted for the bulk of the national gain in urban starts, supported by a surge in Alberta. Starts were also up in Quebec (+1.6k to 41.7k units) and Ontario (+3.3k to 64.6k units). A steep drop in Nova Scotia (-2.8k to 4.6k units), led to starts falling for the Atlantic overall. Meanwhile, starts were flat in B.C.

• October's healthy starts level is consistent with the signal sent from September's strong building permits report. It also sets homebuilding off on the right foot in terms of its contribution to overall economic growth in the fourth quarter.

• The outlook for housing starts remains soft. This is largely due to the outsized weakness expected for Ontario, which will bring down the national figures. We'd note that over the last 12 months, starts have tumbled to levels last seen in 2020 in Ontario. Pre-sales activity remains exceedingly weak in the GTA, pointing to more of the same through 2025.

Latest news on building permit values as of September 2024: Vancouver building permit values plummet in September, says StatCan. Jami Makan, Business in Vancouver.

Building permit values reached $802 million in Vancouver’s census metropolitan area in September 2024, a drop of 14.3 per cent from August 2024 and a drop of 40.8 per cent from September 2023, StatCan reported Nov. 12. 

Building permit values reached $1.45 billion across B.C. in September, of which $1.04 billion was residential and $412 million was non-residential. That’s down 19.1 per cent from a month prior and 40.5 per cent from September 2023.

This is in stark contrast to building permit values for the country as a whole, which increased 11.5 per cent from August to September 2024, reaching $13 billion. That’s also up 11.7 per cent from September 2023, when there were $11.6 billion of residential and non-residential building permits.

In Ontario, permit values increased 25.8 per cent from the same month a year ago, and in Alberta, they increased 28 per cent from a year ago.

I’m puzzled that Ontario building permit values are increasing, even though sales are down.

More

• Value of building permits, by census metropolitan area – seasonally adjusted. Statistics Canada monthly data.

• Crane count dips as Kelowna tower construction slows significantly. Cindy White, Castanet. “Kelowna saw the sharpest drop in building permit value of any census metropolitan area in the country year-over-year in September. While the national average went up by $1.3 billion, or 11.5 per cent, in Kelowna it dropped 83 per cent.”