In July 2008, a total of 3 122 building sites have been registered in the urban centres of Quebec of 10 000 inhabitants and more, provoking a diminution of these by 3 %, in comparison with the same period last year. It is, however, only a slight decrease.
These figures have been made available based upon the monthly poll realized by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).
For the whole of the CMA (Census Metropolitan Area) of Quebec, 2 582 apartments have been started in July of 2008 contrary to 2 626 in July 2007.
Since the beginning of the year 2008, the number of construction sites of individual homes has been exceeded by those of collective housing. One thus notices an increase of construction sites of collective housing in the order of 5 %, if one compares the month of July 2008 with the same period in 2007.
Frédéric Brie, market-analyst at the CMHC specifies: « The relative affordability of co-ownership, duplexes and row houses, compared to individual housing, feeds demand for this type of property, especially in the large urban centres. This contributes, generally, to growth of collective housing building sites, and this, in spite of the decrease registered in the sub-segment of collective housing. »
In July of 2008, quite different results have been noticed in the CMAs of Quebec. While strong increases were noticed in Trois-Rivières (+ 21 %), in Sherbrooke (+21%) and in Montreal (+10%), important decreases were observed in other cities such as Quebec (-14%), Gatineau (-39%), and Saguenay (-42%).
In other comparable centres, one has registered increases of 30 % in St-Hyacinthe and of 22 % in Drummondville. Decreases, however, of construction sites have been noticed in cities like Granby (-15%); Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu (-18%), and Shawinigan (-76%).