The housing market will remain tight in the months to come in Quebec, as the number of housing starts has been in constant decline, for both single-family homes and multi-unit housing, since the start of the year.
Posted at 9:49
Updated at 3:42 p.m.
March data from the Association of Construction and Housing Professionals of Quebec (APCHQ) show 3,981 homes, an overall decline of 9% compared to March 2021.
This is a fourth consecutive month of decline and, for the first three months of 2021, a decline of 21% compared to the first quarter of last year.
The director of the economic service of the APCHQ, Paul Cardinal, argues that “the record pace of the first quarter of 2021 was unsustainable given the marked increase in construction costs, supply problems and the lack of manpower. », problems that affect almost all economic sectors.
In detail, it was mainly single-family homes that experienced the largest drop, or 33%, with 484 foundations poured during the month. The number of multi-unit housing starts reached 3,497, a much smaller decline of 5%.
Regionally, however, three of the province’s six census metropolitan areas saw increases in residential construction last month. That of Gatineau experienced a marked jump, with an increase of 186% compared to March 2021, for a total of 581 dwellings.
Quebec City and Saguenay also denied the downward trend, with increases of 54% and 31% respectively in the number of housing starts.
Conversely, the largest declines occurred in the Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières regions, reaching 71% in both cases.
In Montreal, the decline is 23%, but this decline has a much greater impact on the overall figures given the much larger number of single-family and collective dwellings.
The smallest urban centres, ie those with between 10,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, experienced a decline of 28%.