What lies ahead for housing starts?

The pace of home construction for 2009 peaked as the year was coming to an end, closing out the first year in what is expected to be a markedly different era for the sector than the period that preceded it.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said this week housing starts were up 5.9% in December from the month before, to an annual rate of 174,500 units, the most since October 2008. Most economists expected 160,000 to 165,000 units in December, following 164,800 starts for November.

CMHC chief economist Bob Dugan noted that the normal rate of household formation in Canada is about 175,000 a year, meaning the rate of housing starts for most of the past decade was out of whack with demographic trends.

He said it will likely be a while before 200,000 or more housing starts are seen in one year, adding that it will take another extended period of home building that falls well short of household formation — as happened in the 1990s — to create ideal conditions for another home-building boom.

“Somewhere in the 170,000- to 175,000-unit range is probably where we’re going to see starts for most of 2010,” he said. “We’re getting back to … housing starts in line with that level of household formation.”

Urban housing starts were up 6.6% to 157,100 units in December, CMHC said. Within this category, multiple-unit starts totalled 77,700, up 6.7% from November, while single-unit starts totalled 79,400, up 6.4% from the previous month.

Rural starts were unchanged at 17,400 units.

Ian Pollick, economics strategist at TD Securities, said in a report: “It is increasingly looking like the ‘fever’ in the existing-home sales market is starting to catch in the new residential housing market.”

Marco Lettieri, economist with National Bank Financial, noted that December housing starts were up almost 50% from their April lows. He attributed this to low interest rates, strength in the Canadian job market and a “wealth effect” created from rising property values and stock-market gains.

“This said, we are concerned over the elevated levels of inventory of new unoccupied multiple-family dwellings,” Mr. Lettieri said in a research note. “This points to a current oversupply of inventories and could be an indication of a coming slowdown in multiple starts….”

Mr. Dugan, however, said builders, for the most part, have been responding to shrinking demand appropriately in their production.

(prepared by Derek Abma/National Post)