(file photo/Vernon Matters Staff)

By Liam Verster

23 Starts in October

Local housing starts still down on annual basis

Nov 20, 2024 | 1:33 PM

Greater Vernon continued to see declines in housing construction in October.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said there were 23 housing project starts in the latest reporting month.

That was down from the 38 starts in October of 2023.

The projects started during the most recent month including nine single-family homes, eight row houses, four semi-detached and two apartments.

To date, there had been 160 housing starts in Greater Vernon in 2024. That figure was just over half the 310 projects started locally during the same period of 2023.

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In Kelowna there were 52 housing starts in October, which CMHC also indicated was down from the same month the year before.

However, Kelowna had seen 3,719 housing starts throughout the year so far, which was up from 2023’s figure.

Neither the monthly or year-to-date totals were provided for Kelowna.

Meanwhile, housing construction also slowed across British Columbia and Canada in the latest reporting month.

CMHC said there were 3,350 housing starts in B.C., which were part of the 19,670 starts recorded across the country in October.

Comparatively, B.C. had 4,788 housing starts in October of 2023, while there were a total of 22,163 starts recorded across Canada.

To date, there had been 35,603 housing starts across B.C., as well as 188,112 starts in all of Canada. Those figures were also down from the same point in 2023 when B.C. had recorded 39,839 starts and CMHC said there were 187,406 starts across the country.

Despite the decline, B.C. still had the fourth highest housing starts total of any province in October after Ontario (5,477), Alberta (4,394), and Quebec (4,327). CMHC’s data showed that Alberta and Quebec saw housing start numbers increase on a month-over-month comparison, while Ontario’s figure declined.