Canada Housing Starts Drop in October With Weakness in Ontario, British Columbia

By Robb M. Stewart

OTTAWA--Canadian housing starts pulled back sharply in October as a slump in construction in Ontario and British Columbia countered a pickup in activity elsewhere in the country.

Housing starts across Canada came in at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 232,765 units, a 17% drop from the month before, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said Tuesday. The market was expecting 265,000 residential housing projects to have started for the month, according to economists at TD Securities.

The trend measure--a six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts--declined 3.0% to 268,907 units last month, Canada's national housing agency said.

Higher starts in markets including Montreal, and Calgary and Edmonton in the province of Alberta continue to keep the national year-to-date pace elevated compared with the same period last year, but that was offset in October by significantly lower starts in Ontario and British Columbia, housing agency Deputy Chief Economist Tania Bourassa-Ochoa said.

Bourassa-Ochoa said the results generally reflect investment decisions made months or even years ago, though they also highlight persistent and significant regional contrasts in housing-construction trends across the country.

The agency said actual housing starts were down 3.3% on a year earlier in Canadian centers with a population of 10,000 or greater, with 19,174 units recorded in October. The year-to-date total was 197,207, up about 5% over the same period last year.

There was a recovery in building permits for residential-housing construction in September, the latest month available, with the value rising 4.8% from a month earlier to 7.27 billion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of about $5.17 billion. Still, building intentions were down 8.0% on a year earlier, and the value of permits for the third quarter was the lowest on record, according to data compiled by Statistics Canada.

Housing activity in Canada continues to be tempered by uncertainty and worries about job security following the shift in U.S. trade policy and the tariffs levied on imports of Canadian goods.

National sales of existing homes edged up 0.9% across the country in October, though actual sales were down 4.3% on the same month last year, data released Monday by the Canadian Real Estate Association showed. Average national home prices were down 1.1% year over year, while the association's home-price index edged up 0.2% between September and October.

The Bank of Canada in late October lowered its policy interest rate a second time in a row but signaled it was now moving to the sidelines. Officials said monetary policy was likely close to the limit of what it could do to support the economy, and that the bank's policy rate appeared to be at about the right level to keep inflation close to its 2% target.

Write to Robb M. Stewart at robb.stewart@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 18, 2025 08:58 ET (13:58 GMT)