July building permits: residential gains can’t offset non-residential drops
Although residential construction activity remained strong, the total value of building permits dropped in July.
Statistics Canada reports that building permit values reached $11.7 billion for the month, a drop of 1.5% from June’s total.
On the one side of the ledger, activity in the residential sector grew. The total value of residential permits increased 5.4% to $7.4 billion in July. Ontario (+23.9% to $3.5 billion) contributed the most to the rise in value of both single-family and multi-family dwelling permits.
July marked the third consecutive monthly increase in single-family home permits, up 7.6% to $2.8 billion. This prolonged uptick followed a year of trending decline in construction intentions for single-family homes from May 2022 to April 2023.
Overall, multi-family dwellings construction intentions led the residential gains in Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the six provinces that posted growth in residential permit values in July.
Across Canada, municipalities issued permits for 22,300 new dwellings in July. This amounts to a cumulative total of 150,400 new intended units in 2023. That figure is just under 11% less than the 168,800 new intended units from permits issued between January and July 2022.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, non-residential construction intentions dropped across all components.
The total monthly value of non-residential permits declined 11.5% to $4.3 billion. This comes on the heels of June when a series of exceptionally high-valued hospital permits were issued. As a result, the institutional component was down 19.7% to $1.3 billion.
Construction intentions in the commercial component were also down (-10.8% to $1.9 billion) in July, while the industrial component posted more modest declines (-1.0% to $1.1 billion).