I know, most of you do renovations, but new home activity in your neighbourhood has an impact on your market. When a new home goes up, there is a older home that went up for sale, and any time a home is sold there is on average $1,500 worth of improvements that take place. For those of you that service homes, the new home is another potential future customer.

It will take you two minutes to read the reports the CMHC supplies monthly on your local new home activity. The link is here. It will take you to a CMHC page. Type “Housing Now” and the city you work in the search box in the upper right hand corner.

For instance, if you are in Calgary, type in “Housing Now Calgary” and you’ll get a list of all the monthly reports for housing activity for Calgary for the last few years, including the most recent one. The report’s lead page looks like the one above. and supplies stats and graphs like this:

This is good stuff. Keep the monthly reports in a file Combined with your observations of your own business activity, you’ll get a very good three-dimensional view of what your market is doing and if you have the right strategies for it.