June 30, 2009, CFC Sustainability Blog – Canadian Funding Corp has been keeping its eyes and ears on CBC news to keep up with the latest regarding four new architectural stars. Canadian Funding Corporation CEO Moishe Alexander is thrilled that the architectural firm RVTR wants to do design research on sustainable housing for a northern climate.
RVTR won the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture yesterday. This prize is worth $50,000 and is given so that the winners can travel the globe and learn from a wide variety of architectural structures. The principles of the firm are Paul Raff, Colin Ripley, Kathy Velikov, and Geoffrey Thun.
“It is great to see young, creative minds in this industry that want to make our urban world a better place,” said Canadian Funding Corp CEO Moishe Alexander. “Sustainable housing for northern communities is a huge area of study and is sorely needed. Modular building can be a stunning solution for a many situations.”
“There’s not much of a modular industry in North America,” Thun told CBC News. “When compared to other industrial technologies, home building is really not very advanced.”
He pointed to redundancies in the manufacturing sector, especially in the auto sector, and said creating environmentally friendly pre-fab technologies could fill that void.
“There are significant opportunities for these kinds of technologies to move here,” Thun said, adding that modular building does have the potential to create more affordable housing of greater quality than site-specific building.
In 2010, the design team plans to look at how other northern countries create housing, including Iceland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Thun said the team will be making contact with designers and architects in these countries who are researching modular building and studying how such housing could adapt to different cultural conditions.
“The Scandinavian countries have developed communities based on sustainable housing beyond what we do in Canada,” he said.
The firm has already participated in designing sustainable housing, including a flexible off-grid vacation home called S.W.A.M.P. House. It is also involved in a research project with the University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, Simon Fraser University and U.S. researchers to develop an entirely solar powered prototype home.
A prototype of that home will be shown for the first time in Washington this October.
Housing construction makes gains in May after hitting 13-year low
When Toronto-based developer Murray Koebel put his housing project on the market last summer, he didn’t expect it would coincide with the stock market crash.
There was barely a nibble for seven months at his Vista Homes project in Pickering. So the Vista Homes president responded, like many other developers, by slashing prices by up to $30,000 on some of the units in his development, comprised of 45 single, detached homes and townhouses.
“Those were difficult times,” Koebel said.
But since February, he has sold 18 homes, or about 40 per cent of the development. That compares with the one or two he had sold in the six months prior. “Things really started to pick up in the spring, when people saw that it wasn’t as bad as they thought,” he said.
As a result, Koebel expects to break ground this summer and is cautiously looking around at future projects, a decided turnaround from a few months earlier.
The figures seem to bear him out: The market, while still slow with a recovery not yet on the horizon, shows signs of improvement. Canadian housing construction bounced back in May after dropping to a 13-year low in April, according to figures released by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. yesterday, with seasonally adjusted housing starts hitting 128,400 in May, up from 117,600 in the month prior.
“With the Canadian economy poised to begin the recovery process by this fall, the worst of the residential construction recession might be behind us,” said BMO Capital Markets economist Robert Kavcic.
Starts also rebounded strongly in the Toronto-area market, up by 35 per cent in May to 22,000 units. Most of that was due to the volatile multiple family segment, which includes condominiums and apartment buildings. “After plunging precipitously since late 2007, and appearing to be in free fall in recent months, this rebound may be an indication the sector is perhaps stabilizing,” TD Securities analyst Millan Mulraine said.
The Ontario Home Builders’ Association said yesterday that builders, including Koebel, were seeing “signs of hope” and reporting increased traffic in their sales offices and model homes.
Activity is expected to pick up slightly in the second half of the year.
“Tighter resale markets in recent months, improving credit conditions and a backlog of sales awaiting construction are all factors that will boost activity,” said Ted Tsiakopoulos, regional economist for the CMHC.
Despite the positive figures, starts are still down 42 per cent in year-to-date figures compared with last year, at both the national and Toronto-area levels.
Analysts say the overall drop in starts to date is not necessarily a bad thing, since there has been massive overbuilding in some Canadian cities, particularly in the condominium sector, where more than 35,000 units in the Toronto area alone are already under construction and expected to be largely completed this year and next.
BMO expects the rate of starts to remain below long-term trends because there is too much supply already on the market.
“A sharp rebound is unlikely in this sector thanks to about six years of overbuilding – housing starts will likely remain below the rate of household formation through 2010,” Kavcic said.
One thing that should keep construction workers busy is the renovation industry, which reported $21.3 billion spent by consumers last year, up by $1.6 billion from 2007, according to a separate report by the CMHC.
Existing MLS® home sales activity increased for the second month in a row in March 2009, according to statistics released by The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). The number of new listings also continued trending lower in March, which firmed up the balance of supply to demand.
Reported bu Moishe Alexander, CFC CEO.
A seasonally adjusted total of 31,135 homes traded hands nationally via the Multiple Listing Service® (MLS®) in March 2009. This is an increase of seven per cent from the previous month, and builds on the 10.3 per cent activity gain in February. The number of transactions in March 2009 stands 18 per cent above levels reported in
January 2009, when activity sank to the lowest level in a decade.
The monthly increase in activity was largest in British Columbia (13.6 per cent), and Ontario (10.5 per cent). Sales were also up from February levels in Manitoba, Quebec, and Newfoundland & Labrador.
Actual (not seasonally adjusted) transactions numbered 35,225 units in March 2009. While this remains 13.7 per cent below levels reported in March 2008, it is the smallest year-over-year decline in six months.
The national average price for home sales via the MLS® remains below levels reached one year earlier, but year-over-year declines are shrinking. The MLS® average residential price for homes sold in March 2009 was $288,641, down 7.7 per cent from March 2008. This is the smallest year-over-year decline in six months.
The average price for homes sold via the MLS® set a new record in March 2009 in Manitoba, and remained above year-ago levels in Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador.
The national average price continues to be skewed downward by lower activity in some of Canada’s more expensive housing markets and by fewer transactions at the higher end of the price spectrum. British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, where homes are more expensive, are significant contributors to the current downward trend in national average price. MLS® home sales activity in these provinces accounted for 69 per cent of national activity in March 2008, compared to 67 per cent in March 2009.
The price trend is less dramatic for the weighted national MLS® average price, which compensates for changes in provincial sales activity by taking into account provincial proportions of privately owned housing stock. The weighted national MLS® average sale price was down 4.7 per cent year-over-year in March, compared to a 5.1 per cent decline in February.
“Housing markets are starting to show signs of buyer interest because of lower prices and interest rates,” says Dale Ripplinger, President of The Canadian Real Estate Association. “We expect April sales activity will feel some effects from the federal government incentives announced in the last budget, including the increase in the maximum withdrawal allowed under the Home Buyers’ Plan, and the First Time Buyer Tax Credit.”
Q1 2009 Results
Seasonally MLS® adjusted MLS® sales activity in the first quarter of 2009 was little changed compared to the fourth quarter of 2008, declining by less than one-tenth of a per cent.
The number of homes for sale remains high, but continues trending downward. Seasonally adjusted national MLS® residential new listings numbered 208,755 units in the first quarter of 2009. This is down 6.4 per cent from the previous quarter, and represents the third consecutive quarter-over-quarter decline. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the number of MLS® residential new listings has dropped 11.9 per cent from the peak reached in the second quarter of 2008.
With sales activity increasing and new listings trending lower, the balance between supply and demand is firming up in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. These provinces have the largest influence on the national housing picture, so a firming housing market balance there in March 2009 caused the national housing market balance to tighten for the fourth time in as many months.
“A number of major housing markets are stabilizing, as buyers respond to improving affordability,” said CREA Chief Economist Gregory Klump. “Looking back to economic recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, national resale housing activity bottomed out before the job market or economy did,” said Klump. “It will take time for ample supplies of new and existing homes to be drawn down, but demand appears to be stabilizing.”
PLEASE NOTE: The information contained in this news release combines both major market and national MLS® sales information from the previous month. The Canadian Real Estate Association has previously released these separately.
CREA cautions that average price information can be useful in establishing trends over time, but does not indicate actual prices in centres comprised of widely divergent neighborhoods or account for price differential between geographic areas. Statistical information contained in this report includes all housing types.
MLS® is a co-operative marketing system used only by Canada’s real estate Boards to ensure maximum exposure of properties listed for sale.
The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) is one of Canada’s largest single-industry trade associations, representing more than 98,000 REALTORS® working through more than 100 real estate Boards and Associations. Further information can be found at www.crea.ca.