New Housing Price Index MoM

The New Housing Price Index MoM, or NHPI, measures the monthly percent change in Canadian builders' selling prices for new houses of identical specification. StatCan, Canada's national statistical agency, prices new single, semi-detached and townhome models across 27 large metro zones called CMAs using contract prices less sales taxes. The index starts from December 2016 equal to 100, with city series back to 1981 and figures from 1969 for selected areas. A rise means comparable new houses cost more than a month earlier, while a fall means they cost less.

Collection for a reference month, the month under study, runs over 10 days from around the 15th. Results appear in StatCan's The Daily, out each working day at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, about 3 weeks after month end. Each release prints national, provincial and 27-CMA levels with monthly and yearly percent changes in table 18-10-0205-01. It also posts two dashboards and a Note to readers, and the series is never revised.

It is not seasonally adjusted, so calendar patterns stay in. A city with no sampled builders is filled in from the next-higher aggregation and flagged E.

Three building blocks drive the headline, and each can pull it a different way.

• House only: tracks the structure value, meaning total price less estimated land value, indexed on its own.
• Land only: tracks builders' estimates of serviced lot value, indexed on its own.
• City blocks: 27 CMAs roll up with annual weights from sales values as price-adjusted 3-year moving averages, so big-selling cities sway the nation most.

Its components feed parts of the Consumer Price Index and help deflate the housing stock. In April 2023, released 18 May 2023, the Canada index sat at 124.8, down 0.1 percent on the month and 0.2 percent on the year. House-only sat at 128.2, down 0.2 percent on the month, while land-only sat at 116.5, up 0.1 percent on the month.

Provinces split widely: Manitoba rose 1.1 percent, Quebec rose 0.6 percent and Saskatchewan rose 0.5 percent. Nova Scotia fell 0.6 percent, Newfoundland and Labrador fell 0.4 percent and Ontario fell 0.2 percent. The lesson is plain: a flat national number can mask offsetting regions and parts, so never read the headline as every market.

1. Price relative: for each builder model, divide the same-spec price in month t by the price in month t-1, stripping out promotions and upgrades.
2. Jevons city move: combine a city's model relatives as an equally weighted geometric mean, so big and small moves blend evenly. Illustration: model A moves from 500000 to 505000 for 1.0100 while model B stays at 400000 for 1.0000. The city move is 1.00499, chained from a prior index of 120.0 to 120.6.

1. Chaining: multiply the city move by the prior month's city index to extend the series from its base.
2. Lowe national aggregate: add city indexes using fixed annual weights from past sales values updated each January, done apart for house, land and total. Example: 0.20 times 120.6 plus 0.80 times 125.0 equals 124.1.

1. Model replacement: when a model vanishes, a regression on size and features fills in its prior price so the new model joins at once.
2. Basket linking: when weights or base change, old and new series join through overlap month December 2016 to keep history smooth.