Canadian home building rebounds from deep freeze

Bloomberg

Canada housing starts rebounded in March from a sluggish performance a month earlier, returning to levels more in line with demographics and highlighting the buoyancy of the nation’s battered real estate market.
Builders started an annualised 192,527 homes in March, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported. That’s up from 166,290 a month earlier, when excessively cold weather slowed construction.
While housing starts are down considerably from the elevated levels of the past two years, the current pace is largely consistent with population growth and household formation and suggests builders haven’t been scared off by recent sales declines in some of the country’s priciest markets.
“Canada’s housing market is down but far from out,” Sal Guatieri, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, said in a note to investors. “The latest data on construction suggests the downward trend is stabilising.”