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This article was published 8/5/2017 (1227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The local homebuilding industry is off to its fastest start in 30 years, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said Monday.

The agency said there were 1,950 single- and multi-family starts recorded in the Winnipeg Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) during the first four months of 2017. That’s the most for the first four months of the year since 1987.

April was also the fourth consecutive month in which housing starts were more numerous than in the same month in 2016. CMHC said there were 380 single- and multi-family starts recorded in the CMA last month and that was an 18.4 per cent increase from the 321 starts recorded in April of last year.

"In Winnipeg, a decrease in inventories in the new-home market and balanced resale-market conditions are allowing builders to increase production," the agency noted in a release.

Heather Bowyer, CMHC’s senior market analyst for Winnipeg, said that had been a build-up in the number of completed but unsold new homes during 2015 and the early part of 2016.

"But by the end of the year (2016), the inventories were down quite a bit," she said. That gave builders the confidence to start ramping up production again.

She said a decline this year in the number of new listings coming onto the resale-homes market also helped.

"People not finding what they’re needing in the resale market are looking to the new-homes market."

Mike Moore, outgoing president of the Manitoba Home Builders Association (MHBA), said another factor that helped boost housing-start activity was the City of Winnipeg’s controversial new impact fee, which came into effect on May 1.

The fee, which amounts to about $5 a square foot, applies to any new house or condominium built after May 1 in new or emerging areas of the city. It’s designed to raise additional revenue to help offset the cost of providing new infrastructure — things such as regional roads, transit service and recreation and leisure facilities for these new subdivisions.

But builders and homebuyers could avoid paying the fee if they applied for their building permits before May 1 and begin building before Nov.1.

Moore said a lot of them did try to beat the deadline, which is partly why permit applications and housing starts were both elevated through the first four months of the year.

He and Bowyer predicted housing-starts will remain elevated for some time yet, as work gets underway on the remainder of the projects that were squeezed in before the May 1 deadline.

"But we anticipate it slowing down in the late fall and into winter," Moore said.

He said the inventory of unsold homes will also likely increase later in the year, as the 130 homes being built for the MHBA’s Fall Parade of Homes are completed.

"But hopefully they’ll be sold right away," he said.

April’s increase in housing starts was evident on both sides of the new-homes market, with single starts up by 14.6 per cent to 220 units from 192 in April 2016 and multi-family starts up by 24 per cent to 160 units from 129.

Year to date, the biggest increase in activity was on the multi-family side, where starts were up by 162 per cent to 1,226 units from 468 a year earlier. Single starts were up by 36.1 per cent to 724 units from 532.

On a trending basis, housing starts in the Winnipeg CMA were trending at 5,560 units in April, compared to 5,524 units in March. The trend is the six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of starts. It indicates the annual level of starts that would be obtained if the same pace of monthly construction activity were maintained for the full year.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca