09/12/2010 - CBC News
New home prices in October rose across Canada for the third month in a row, Statistics Canada said Thursday.
The agency's national new housing price index climbed 0.1 per cent in the month, down from the 0.2 per cent gain new home values increased in September. But October was still the third consecutive month in which the index headed north.
"The top contributors to the monthly increase ... were Toronto and Oshawa, as well as Vancouver," Statistics Canada said in a press release.
The index is designed to measure home prices for similar abodes and uses 1997 values as the base.
Thus, the index value for an average Canadian home in October stood at 158, or 58 per cent higher than the price of the same home in 1997.
Saskatoon experienced the biggest price jump, at 0.8 per cent in the month. Statistics Canada said rising labour costs in the city led to the higher new home prices.
Saskatchewan enjoyed the second lowest unemployment rate among provinces at 5.5 per cent in November, more than two percentage points below the national average of 7.6 per cent in the same month.
A low jobless rate indicates the potential for higher labour costs as companies hike wages to attract increasingly fewer available workers.
Interestingly, new home prices in Calgary dropped by 0.6 per cent in October despite the fact Alberta's unemployment decreased to six per cent from 6.2 per cent in September.
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