New home building in Sarnia-Lambton slowed in the first half of 2023

A drop in the number of local new home building permits issued in the first half of 2023, compared to the year before, didn’t surprise Lambton County’s chief building official.

“Our numbers were extremely high through the pandemic,” said Corinne Nauta, Lambton’s building services manager. “The reality is we knew these numbers were going to come back down.”

The county issues building permits for nine of Lambton’s 11 municipalities. Sarnia and Lambton Shores issue their own.

The nine municipalities – St. Clair Township, Plympton-Wyoming, Point Edward, Petrolia, Oil Springs, Brooke-Alvinston, Warwick Township, Enniskillen Township and Dawn-Euphemia Township – saw a total of 84 building permits for new housing units issued in the first half of 2023, compared to 114 during the same period of 2022, according to a county report.

The report also lists building permit statistics from Sarnia and Lambton Shores as a comparison.

Sarnia issued 25 permits for new housing units in the first half of 2023, compared to 47 in the first half of 2022, the county said. Lambton Shore’s numbers were 17 and 31, respectively.

While pandemic restrictions slowed parts of the economy, real estate and homebuilding picked up steam.

“Through the pandemic, the houses couldn’t be built fast enough,” Nauta said. “They kept putting them up and people were moving in right away.”

While the number of new housings starts in the first half of this year is down compared to 2022, “we’re still high when you look back four or five years ago,” Nauta said.

“Our numbers are still very strong,” she said.

“The demand for new housing has changed,” said Scott Henderson, president of the Sarnia-Lambton Home Builders Association. “Through COVID it became unrealistic.”

But moves since then by the Bank of Canada to battle inflation by raising interest rates are having an impact, Henderson said.

“The person who was going to, let’s say, move up” into a new home “is maybe not moving up because the buyer for their house doesn’t want to make a move on it yet,” he said.

“The higher interest rates are doing, I guess, what they’re supposed to do – slowing down the economy – if that’s a good thing,” Henderson said.

While local homebuilders shouldn’t complain about current demand, “everybody would probably like to do more,” he said.

Nauta said more multi-residential construction is happening locally and county planners are working on “accessory dwelling unit language” for local planning documents to allow more basement units and detached units in backyards as part of a provincial push to see more homes, and more affordable units, created.

Adding accessory dwellings allows that to happen using existing residential land, she said.

“It makes sense,” Nauta said. “Not everyone can afford a brand-new home on a brand-new lot.”

Activity to add accessory units is already showing up in Sarnia’s building permit statistics and “I think we’ll start to see it in the rest of the county, shortly,” she said.

Plympton-Wyoming had the highest number of new home construction starts with 39 in the first six months of this year. That’s down only slightly from 41 in the same period in 2022.

“They’ve got a large development on the go – Errol Woods,” near Camlachie, Nauta said.

“St. Clair Township also has lots of development going on,” she said.

Building permits for 23 new homes were issued in St. Clair in the first half of this year, compared to 31 at the same point in 2022, the county said.

Numbers for the first half of 2023 in the remaining municipalities in Lambton were:

– Brooke-Alvinston, one unit

– Dawn-Euphemia, two units

– Enniskillen, two units

– Oil Springs, three units

– Petrolia, three units

– Point Edward, four units

– Warwick, seven units

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