Photo: Contributed
Kelowna saw construction begin on fewer homes in December of 2017 than December 2016, but that didn’t stop the city from marking a record-breaking number of housing starts in 2017.
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation released its final batch of housing starts data for 2017, showing construction began on 261 new homes last month.
That’s a 17 per cent drop from the 316 started in December of 2016.
But while numbers were down slightly in December, the yearly total tells a different story.
Over the course of 2017, construction began on 3,577 homes in Kelowna. That record-setting number far eclipsed the 2,196 housing starts for 2016 in the city.
The CMHC chalked the spurt of new homes up to developers responding to the significant migration into the region, both from prairie provinces suffering after the collapse of oil prices, and the lower mainland, where many are seeking to escape a hyper-inflated housing market.
New home construction has been on the rise in Kelowna since a market crash in 2008 gutted the housing market.
That year, the CMHC recorded 2,257 housing starts in Kelowna. In 2009, in the aftermath of the crash, housing starts went down by 70 per cent, with only 657 new homes being built.
Over the next five years, housing starts stayed in the 1,000-a-year range, until the rate spiked to 1,311 in 2014.
By 2016, Kelowna’s housing starts had just about reached 2008 levels, sitting at 2,196.
While 2017 saw starts far above that, many have predicted a slight softening of the market in 2018. The slight decline in housing starts in December 2017 could be foreshadowing that.
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