Housing starts stable in 2023, but demand still outpaces growing supply of apartments + MORE Mar 28th

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says construction of new homes in Canada’s six largest cities remained stable at near all-time high levels last year, driven by a surge of new apartments—despite demand still outpacing supply for rental housing.

The agency released its biannual housing supply report on Wednesday, which showed combined housing starts in the Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa regions dipped 0.5% compared with 2022, totalling 137,915 units.

That was in line with the annual average of around 140,000 new units over the past three years. CMHC deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth said the 2023 numbers came in “better than we thought.”

“We ended up being positively surprised by 2023. We were really quite concerned that higher interest rates were going to really have an impact,” said ab Iorwerth.

“They did have an impact, but it seems to have been on smaller structures, single-detached (homes) and so forth.”

Apartment starts grew 7% to reach a record 98,774 individual units last year…

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