Good article on the real estate market in Canada.
Quote:
The second-largest country in the world is running out of land
...Nearly 60 per cent of home sales last year in 18 communities in and around Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa were for single-family detached houses, according to data compiled from local real estate boards by Bloomberg News. Only about a quarter of the sales in these places were for apartments.
But when you look at what has been built in these same cities and their nearby bedroom communities over the last decade, the percentages are exactly reversed: 60 per cent of new housing stock is apartments, and just 25 per cent detached houses, according to government data compiled by Bloomberg. That mismatch has forced desperate bidders to vie for an increasingly constrained supply of single-family homes. In 2020, Canada’s benchmark home prices gained almost 15 per cent, with only Luxemburg posting a bigger increase, according to a data from the Dallas Fed.
Still, developers don’t seem to be responding. Though construction started on a record number of new homes in Canada’s metro areas in March, the percentage that were single family-detached actually fell to 19 per cent from 24 per cent the previous year, according to government data. While this ratio improved in April, new home starts slowed that month overall.
“If there is a problem it’s in the composition of the new supply,” said Robert Kavcic, an economist with the Bank of Montreal. “We don’t build single detached homes anymore. And it just so happens from a demographic perspective that’s what the market demands. So we’re kind of stuck on that front.”...
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-seco...land-1.1605274
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Given the constraints on growth and detached home builds in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver, and the fact the great majority of Canadians starting a family still want a detached home, Calgary should become an attractive destination.