According to Statistics Canada, new home prices increased 1.9 percent in April at the national level, with prices up in 22 of the 27 census metropolitan areas surveyed.
Increasing construction costs continued to push new home prices higher in April. Building construction costs for both single homes (+6.8 percent) and townhouses (+6.9 percent) rose in the first quarter, mostly driven by five consecutive monthly price increases for softwood lumber, which rose a further 10.2 percent in April.
Nevertheless, higher home prices did not slow the demand for single-family homes, despite weakness in certain sectors of the economy. According to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), national home sales increased 256.0 percent in April 2021 compared with last year. Months of inventory, which indicate how fast existing listings would sell, were relatively low at two months on a national basis. This indicates a persistent and strong demand for houses across most of the country.
Nationally, new house prices rose 9.9 percent year over year in April—the largest increase since February 2007. Year-over-year changes in new house prices have been rapidly accelerating since December 2020.
Nationally, new home prices were up in all 27 markets on an annual basis, with the largest gains in Ottawa (+23.7 percent) and Kitchener–Cambridge–Waterloo (+21.9 percent), followed closely by Windsor (+17.9 percent) and Montréal (+17.7 percent). In April, all four cities recorded their highest annual increases since the beginning of the New Housing Price Index in February 1981.