After spiking in April and May, residential construction in Alberta slowed in June with seasonally adjusted housing starts* contracting by 14.8%.

Despite the lower number of starts in June, activity over the first half of the year is higher than it has been in five years.

The annualized number of monthly starts averaged 31,000 over the January to June period compared to just 21,800 in 2020 and 24,200 in 2019.

The majority of the drop in overall starts in June occurred in Calgary where they fell by 26.4% compared to the red hot pace set the month before (18,482 annualized starts in May versus 13,607 in June). Starts in Edmonton edged up by 0.2%, going from 12,310 to 12,337.

Nationally, housing starts declined by 1.5% in June. As in Alberta, new construction levels were much higher over the first half of 2021 than in 2020 and 2019.

*A housing start is defined as the beginning of construction work on a building, usually when the concrete has been poured for the whole of the footing around the structure, or an equivalent stage where a basement will not be part of the structure.

Answer to the previous trivia question: Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is Canada’s largest company with $82.1 billion in revenue in 2020. It is headquartered in Toronto.

Today’s trivia question: How many of the 800 largest corporations in Canada in 2020 had annual revenue that year of $1 billion or more?