housing-completions(6)

1.	0xdb8f...bcfd	4.5M
2.	jcandqc	4.1M
3.	baldinini	941K
4.	partytime	939K
5.	jimmyyyy	918.6K
6.	witcher01	898.8K
7.	kualta.eth	869.1K
8.	Brandon Donnelly	702.4K
9.	ZORG	487.3K
10.	nftmatrix	170.5K

housing-completions(6)

1.	0xdb8f...bcfd	4.5M
2.	jcandqc	4.1M
3.	baldinini	941K
4.	partytime	939K
5.	jimmyyyy	918.6K
6.	witcher01	898.8K
7.	kualta.eth	869.1K
8.	Brandon Donnelly	702.4K
9.	ZORG	487.3K
10.	nftmatrix	170.5K

February 27, 2025

Our looming housing shortage

The turning point for the Toronto housing market, including pre-construction condominiums, was, I would say, in the spring/summer of 2022. This is when the market turned and sentiment changed dramatically. What that means is that we are about to enter year three of this downturn. Time flies when you're grinding away. How long it lasts is anyone's guess, but new sales and completions are a good place to look.

Last year, the GTHA saw approximately 29,800 condominium homes complete according to Urbanation. This is slightly above Zonda's estimate of 27,228. Whatever the exact number, it was a high number of completions. And this year, the forecast is for something similar. But given how precipitously new home sales have fallen off, it's only a matter of time before completions do the same.

Here's what Zonda Urban is currently forecasting:

November 12, 2022

Two multi-family booms

January 24, 2022

A nation of apartment dwellers

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) recently published its latest data on housing starts, housing under construction, and housing completions. Here are a few of the highlights:

Canada saw 271k housing starts last year (2021). This includes single-detached housing and multiples, which captures semi-detached housing, row housing, and apartments (and other unit types). This is the highest number of annual housing starts that we have seen over the last five years. The range for the prior years has been between roughly 209-220k.
Ontario saw 100k (~37% of the country), Quebec saw 68k (~25% of the country), and British Columbia saw 48k (~18% of the country).
What I was curious about when I first saw these numbers was the split across the various housing types. Single-family homes, for instance, came in at 82k for all of Canada. So that's about 30% of total housing starts. If you add in semi-detached and row, which I believe would also be all grade-related, you get to 124k or 46% of all housing starts.
Apartments and other unit types make up the balance at about 147k or 54% of all housing starts. This is kind of interesting because they now represent a majority.
Looking at Ontario, the percentage of apartments actually drops to 50%. But the numbers are much higher in both Quebec and BC at 69% and 63%, respectively. Again, this is kind of interesting.

Here is an interesting chart, from Mike Moffat, that looks at housing completions -- both ownership and rental -- in the province of Ontario. The way to read this chart is that, for each date, you are looking at completions for the previous 10 years. (It says 12, but that seems to be a mistake.) For example, Q4-1964, which is the start of this chart, equals all homes built between Q1-1955 and Q4-1964.

Three things will probably immediately stand out to you:

We built a lot of multi-family housing in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, we built more than we're building right now and that wasn't just the case in Toronto and Ontario. In Canada as a whole, the majority of building permits (60%) issued between 1962 and 1973 were for multi-family buildings. More specifically though, this was a rental apartment boom, as opposed to a condominium boom.
We then said: "Nah, let's not build so many apartments anymore. Let's go back to building more single-family houses."
And that's what we did -- by a fairly wide margin -- until the early 2000s when the next great multi-family boom started to take hold. This time, though, it developed into a condominium boom.

Both multi-family booms have mirrored periods of overall economic expansion. But you also need to look at what government was doing. In the 1960s and 1970s we made it attractive to build rental housing (whereas today it's a very challenging asset class to underwrite). And then more recently, we decided that much of our growth should happen in existing built-up urban areas. That generally means more multi.

But multi-family is a fairly broad term. Are we talking about 4-storey walk-ups or are we talking about 40-storey tall buildings? For those of you who are able to look through this chart to what's happening in the market, you'll know that we are far more effective at the latter. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the in-between housing scales.

Brandon Donnelly

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