Ontario Housing Supply · Updated monthly
Ontario Housing Supply Update — April 2026
Ontario built 24% more housing units this April than last April. And 17% fewer single-detached homes. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the story.
Ontario housing starts — April 2026
Seasonally adjusted annual rate. Year-over-year comparison vs. same month prior year.
| Housing type | Prior year | Current | YoY change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-detached | 10,085 | 8,340 | −17.3% |
| Multi-unit | 55,754 | 73,483 | +31.8% |
| Total starts | 65,839 | 81,823 | +24.3% |
What the data shows
CMHC released its April 2026 monthly housing starts on May 21st. The Ontario picture is straightforward: total starts up, ground-related ownership down. Multi-unit construction is doing the work. Single-detached housing is shrinking even as overall production grows. The mix is shifting away from the housing type families actually ask for.
Why conventional supply is pulling back
Stick-built single-detached construction at current land, permit, financing, and trade-labour costs has stopped penciling out for most builders below a certain price point. So they’re rotating to multi-unit where the land-use economics work and the buyer base is captive renters. This is not a failure of conventional construction. It’s a rational response to its cost structure. The families who want a house with a yard get pushed into a rental tower, or out of the market entirely.
Where modular fits
Factory-built homes cost less to produce, deliver faster, and don’t carry the weather and trade-fragmentation risk that has made site-built single-detached economically marginal. Modular doesn’t replace conventional construction. It restores the housing type conventional construction has abandoned. CMHC counts modular homes on permanent foundations in its housing starts data — we’re inside the numbers, not outside them. As conventional single-detached pulls back, modular’s share of ground-related housing grows even when the total looks flat.
See how modular homes deliver for buyers in Ontario, or read the REALTOR® field guide for the talking points to use with clients.
Small centres and the coverage gap
The CMHC survey enumerates centres of 10,000 population and over. In smaller communities — Grand Bend, on-reserve First Nations land, rural Ontario, exurban land-lease — coverage is partial and starts in that footprint dropped 33% year-over-year. The supply gap is largest in the places conventional builders rarely go. Those are the places modular delivers fastest.
For landowners outside major centres, our landowner partnership model puts modular communities into footprints conventional developers won't touch.
What this means for buyers and investors
For homebuyers: the conventional pipeline for ground-related ownership is thinning. Waiting for site-built supply to recover is waiting for an economic problem to fix itself. Modular delivers within months at price points conventional builders no longer hit. For investors: rental demand is structural. Conventional supply is shifting away from the ground-related units families ask for. Single-unit modular ownership and small-scale rental plays sit in the gap.
Run the numbers on a modular rental play with the rental income calculator.