New home sales declined sharply in Ottawa last month, prompting a major homebuilders’ group to call for quicker action from governments on proposals such as lowering development fees and eliminating the GST for first-time homebuyers. A total of 245 new housing units were sold in Ottawa in April, down more than 20 per cent from […]
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New home sales declined sharply in Ottawa last month, prompting a major homebuilders’ group to call for quicker action from governments on proposals such as lowering development fees and eliminating the GST for first-time homebuyers.
A total of 245 new housing units were sold in Ottawa in April, down more than 20 per cent from the 309 homes purchased in the same month in 2024, according to the latest housing market report from the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association and PMA Brethour Realty Group.
New home sales also dropped 16 per cent from March, when 291 units were sold. Transactions since the start of January are now down five per cent year-over-year, erasing a strong start to 2025, the association said in a news release this week.
While Ottawa didn’t see the same downturn in new home sales some other big Canadian cities experienced earlier in the year, GOHBA executive director Jason Burggraaf said headwinds such as economic uncertainty triggered by the global trade war are catching up to developers in the nation’s capital.
“I think finally now we’re seeing maybe that shoe has dropped a little bit,” Burggraaf said in an interview with OBJ on Thursday.
He said an industry that was already struggling for the past few years with rising interest rates and surging development fees now faces consumers who are hesitant to pull the trigger on new home purchases as they anxiously monitor the ongoing trade war and wait to see if governments make good on various policies aimed at easing the housing crisis.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, for example, pledged during the recent federal election campaign that his government would scrap the GST on all “new and substantially renovated” homes worth up to $1 million that are sold to first-time buyers.
Meanwhile, Ontario Housing Minister Rob Flack introduced a bill designed to speed up new housing construction through a number of measures, including “simplifying, streamlining and reducing” development charges across the province.
Burggraaf said those announcements are enticing would-be buyers to hold off on purchasing new homes until the proposed measures take effect.
“Why wouldn’t I wait another two, three, four (months), however long it takes, to save … somewhere between thirty and eighty thousand dollars on a home?” Burggraaf said.
“I’ve got (developers) already commenting that … the amount of activity they typically would have seen at sales centres (from first-time buyers) has dropped off completely.”
Burggraaf said homebuilders “desperately need certainty” on whether the federal and provincial governments plan to go ahead with measures aimed at cutting the price of new homes.
“Demand doesn't go away,” he added. “It just stays pent up on the sidelines. There are a lot of people out there just sort of waiting for the right conditions to jump back into the market. It’s a matter of when those conditions are going to be settled.
“I was hoping against hope that we would continue to kind of buck the downward trend of consumer confidence on the sales side. Hopefully we get some certainty from … government and some hard timelines so we can pull ourselves out of it sooner rather than later.”
