Vernon’s housing construction remains slow, Kelowna’s figures improving

Jun 17, 2024 | 12:00 PM

New housing construction in Greater Vernon remains well below the activity from last year.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) reported 13 local housing starts in May of 2024.

While that figure was the same as the starts in April, it was down from the 25 starts recorded in May of 2023.

The projects launched last month included five single family homes, four semi-detached and four row houses.

To date, a total of 48 housing projects had been started in Greater Vernon in 2024, down from the 163 in the first five months of 2023.

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While Greater Vernon’s local housing construction sector remained slow, that wasn’t the case for the rest of the Okanagan, or for the province and the nation.

CMHC’s data for Kelowna showed there were a total of 1,052 housing starts in May, which was up by 592 per cent on an annual basis. That increase was mainly attributed to 1,013 apartment starts in May of 2024, which were up by 788 per cent when compared to the apartment starts in May of 2023.

There were 32 single family starts in Kelowna this past May, which was the same figure recorded during the same month the year prior.

To date, there has been 2,104 housing starts in Kelowna, which is up 52 per cent from the same time in 2023.

CMHC’s data showed there were 3,748 housing starts in British Columbia and 21,652 projects started across Canada in May. Those figures were improvements from May of 2023 when there were 3,228 starts in B.C. and 15,606 across the nation.

As of the end of May, there had been 18,978 housing starts launched in B.C. and 89,527 throughout Canada. Those were both up from the same period last year when there were 18,839 starts in B.C. and 79,635 in all of Canada.

by Liam Verster

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