This post focuses on the cost of a new house not the cost of housing. A new house is an asset, a stock; the cost of housing is a continuing cost, a flow and will be dealt with separately.

Statistics Canada prepares and publishes the monthly New Housing Price Index Table 18-10-0205-01. The database goes back to January 1981 and monitors house prices through various economic shocks.

The NHPI tracks the price of the newly built house and the price of the land. The national average price of each is illustrated in Figure 1 along with the Consumer Price Index for all items as a reference point for the perspective of the average house buyer.

Some casual observations regarding Figure 1:

1. the price of new housing dipped in the latter part of the 80’s then held level until the middle of the second half of the first decade of the 21st century.
2. Price changes of land and new building generally followed each other except for the twenty years 1990-ish through 2005-ish. The supply of land is partly a function of property land-use regulations which may reduce the availability of land for new housing. The cost of the house will reflect the marginal cost of material and labour input.
3. In the lead up to the pandemic years the price of new construction rose faster than the price of land.

Data in this spreadsheet will support a similar analysis for 27 cities, and averages for each of the provinces and territories.

From the NHPI Technical Guide:

The new housing price index (NHPI) measures the change over time in builders’ prices of newly built houses (single/semi-detached homes and townhomes). The NHPI is a monthly index available for 27 cities.

Cities included in the NHPI are: St. John’s, Charlottetown, Halifax, an aggregate of Saint John, Fredericton, and Moncton, Québec, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Montréal, Ottawa-Gatineau (Quebec part), Ottawa-Gatineau (Ontario part), Oshawa, Toronto, Hamilton, St. Catharines-Niagara, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Guelph, London, Windsor, Greater Sudbury, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Kelowna, Vancouver, and Victoria.

For the purpose of the NHPI, prices are defined as either the transaction price or the list price for a model of a house as reported by the builder in a given month, exclusive of any sales tax. This is the price received by the builder, and excludes any additional fees paid by the buyer

The survey collects builders’ estimates of the current value (evaluated at market price) of the land.