Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear today.
My name is Brad Jones, and I'm the chief development officer at Wesgroup Properties, which is located in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Wesgroup is one of Canada's largest privately held real estate organizations and has delivered over 10,000 homes, along with commercial space, across metro Vancouver.
I'd like to speak about a nuanced issue that has become increasingly important in Canada's housing response: the timing of how housing starts are measured and how it impacts policy decisions on housing.
When housing start data, as currently defined, is used as real-time data, it leads to misinformed policy action or inaction. The CMHC considers low-rise construction to have started when the foundation has been poured, such as for a single-family home or a townhouse project. For larger apartment projects with underground parking, it is not recorded until the concrete structure reaches grade. In modern urban apartment construction, that can occur 12 to 24 months after construction activity has begun.
On a real project we've been working on at Wesgroup, sales took place in 2022. Excavation took place in 2023, and the concrete foundation at the bottom of the excavation began in 2024. However, it wasn't until January 2025, when the structure reached grade, that it showed up as a housing start in CMHC data. In practical terms, that activity had been under way for over 18 months before it counted as a housing start.
As our housing supply in Canada has shifted towards urban high-rise construction, the issues become more noticeable in large region statistics. The concern is that delaying this reporting moves construction activity from prior years into today's numbers, creating a misleading picture of current market conditions. These housing start statistics have been used widely by government, economists and the media to assess the health of the housing market and broader economic activity. Whether or not this is the intent of the statistic, this is how it's being used, and it needs to be addressed in the way that it's being used.
Federal housing targets are evaluated using these figures. Ministers have cited them publicly. Economists use them as signals of strength. Provincial and municipal governments rely on these statistics when assessing housing policy change. If apartment projects are only recorded 12 to 24 months after construction begins, policy-makers are responding to outdated conditions.
In metro Vancouver, after adjusting for the differences in private sector tracking methodologies, our findings show that CMHC housing starts in 2025 exceeded actual market activity by more than 5,000 units, which is roughly 24%. I'll put that into perspective. British Columbia recorded 44,000 housing starts in 2025. This issue alone in metro Vancouver represents 12% of housing starts in B.C. This is a significant data gap and leads to many local government officials delaying action—stating we have not seen a decline in housing starts—when considering adjusting policy.
There are broader implications as well. The mistimed data means that $2 billion in economic activity in metro Vancouver and roughly 10,000 jobs are linked to those housing starts, which actually occurred in 2023 and 2024. This is not an accusation that CMHC is reporting inaccurate data intentionally. The issue is methodological timing. It is a combination of the increasing use of the data to measure the real-time health of the housing market and the methodology's no longer reflecting how large urban construction projects occur in Canada's large cities. This should be reviewed and modernized to determine that housing starts actually start at building permit issuance or excavation start to better align with the real economic activity taking place. We cannot effectively manage a housing crisis using data that reflects where the market was 12 to 24 months ago rather than where it stands today.
Thank you very much.