Demand for homes are up, but since the pandemic construction and land costs have made it harder for local developers to keep houses affordable.

Ted Russell, vice president of Crescent Homes in Waterloo, said the demand for homes was almost overwhelming before the recent interest rate hikes,

“We couldn’t even keep up with the amount of people wanting homes from us and we couldn’t even get enough trades to build the houses fast enough,” he told CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition.

But some of the biggest challenges facing developers in the construction industry is affordability of land and cost of materials.

“With the recent inflation we’ve seen, some of the trades were seeing 40 to 50 per cent increase in costs since COVID,” he said, which makes the balance of affordability that much harder.

Ontario’s More Homes Built Faster Act, also known as Bill 23, aims to accelerate the construction of 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years. Cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge have all pledged to build thousand of homes as part of the Bill 23 by 2031. 

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