Achi news desk-
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) says record population growth in Nova Scotia is preventing the province from meeting housing demands.
According to CMHC’s Housing Market Outlook report, new home construction in Halifax is expected to increase, but completions of those projects are lagging where they need to be.
“Given the level of population growth we’ve seen, we need to address supply and demand,” said Kelvin Ndoro, CMHC’s economics lead.
The report showed that although Nova Scotia is already seeing a record number of new units being built, the completion of the projects is still behind by about three years.
“While trying to complete these projects they also have to compete for the same labor when starting new projects.” Ndoro said. “At the same time, expect to see a slowdown in the completion rate simply because there is not enough labor to go around.”
About 8,700 mostly apartment units have been under construction since February, according to the Nova Scotia Real Estate Association.
“We have just over 360 single family units under construction, so that’s 8,700, that’s new units over the next two to three years that we can see coming to fruition,” said Suzanne Gravel, president of the Nova Scotia Real Estate. Association.
Construction in Dartmouth, NS (Source: Hafsa Arif/CTV News Atlantic)With the demand for housing so high, the cost of homes has also increased, exceeding the budgets of many buyers.
“The most popular non-durable home prices on our markets are between $300-$500,000. Those are our fastest homes off the market,” Gravel said.
This in turn increases rental costs, which is something the province has been seeing since the pandemic.
“At the moment it leaves a lot of people still renting and the challenge with that is that renting isn’t particularly affordable either so you have this situation where people feel they don’t have a chance to buy, but they are also squeezed. on the rental side of things,” said Nova Scotia realtor Chandler Haliburton.
Currently, Nova Scotia has 854 homes on the market within that range; 149 of them are in the Halifax area.
Much of the new construction around the city is for rental units and Haliburton said that addresses another issue that exists in the market.
“When you’re building on building, you can potentially add 100 units to the market. Housing does not work the same. You could do a whole street and if you’re lucky you might add 16 units of single family homes,” he said.
