Ontario home construction is tanking while other provinces boom

When numerous forthcoming condo and townhome projects are going into receivership and dozens more have been deferred until buyers start showing more interest, you know the real estate market is struggling — and that's the state the Toronto area has been stuck in for months.

Tariffs and the recession have people waiting things out, leading property sales to plunge from historic norms and listings to pile up as homes sit on the market for weeks longer than they might have a few years ago.

Developers, meanwhile, are facing high building costs, and exorbitant (and rising) taxes and fees — some of which have escalated by 1,000 per cent in less than 15 years — alongside rock-bottom presales.

It's got new home construction tanking, especially in the condo sector, which is faring quite dismally.

Ontario developers in a panic as new home construction falls off a cliffhttps://t.co/FH7ni1rQ1f

— blogTO (@blogTO) August 23, 2024

The latest report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) shows that while housing starts rose across Canada in April — by 17 per cent year-over-year in larger towns and cities — Ontario was one of only three provinces that bucked the positive trend.

"The increased starts activity in April was driven by increases across all housing types in Quebec and the Prairie provinces, while starts in Ontario and British Columbia declined on a year-over-year basis again this month," the CMHC wrote in its report this week.

Looking at the numbers, construction somehow kicked off on more new homes in Alberta (16,749) than in Ontario (16,115) during April, despite us having more than three times that province's population (16.2 million to their 5 million).

Manitoba and Saskatchewan, listed together as "Prairies" and collectively having less than half the number of residents of even Alberta, also saw far more construction than Canada's most populous province, with work commencing on 16,115 new units.

How the provinces compared when it came to adding new homes to the market last month. Chart from the CMHC.

Even worse, Toronto specifically saw new housing starts fall 25 per cent from April 2024 to April 2025  — Montreal, by comparison, saw a staggering 64 per cent increase, as did Vancouver (of a lesser 6 per cent).

This is, the CMHC says, due to a sharp drop in multi-unit starts, a.k.a. condos, but also comes at a time when T.O. is seeing more new home listings each month than anywhere else in Canada, with tens of thousands of existing homes sitting on the market.

Even with Ontario dragging the stats down, last month had the most new home starts in Canada (when looking at the actual figure, not seasonally-adjusted rates or six-month moving averages) out of any April on record — much needed for our high immigration levels and surging population.