THE HOUSING PIPELINE
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THE HOUSING PIPELINE
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Four stages, four numbers, one clog. The clay band on the left is the pipeline, and its width is the true flow at each stage.
Built by FGO Finance Group. Sources below.
Houses are fine.
Apartments fell a third in three months.
Private houses rose 2.8% in May to 10,537. Apartments and townhouses collapsed from 9,339 in February to 6,034, exactly where governments are counting on supply to come from.
Every quarter since the Accord began has missed.
Cumulative shortfall since mid-2024 at a 60,000-a-quarter pace: 88,097 dwellings and compounding. Outside one strong quarter at the end of 2025, starts have been stuck in the mid-to-high 40s for two years.
The pipe is at its widest ever.
That is the whole story.
A year ago it held 220,248. Homes are entering the build phase faster than the industry can finish them, while an accelerating infrastructure program ($38.9bn of engineering work last quarter, up 7.1%) bids for the same trades.
Record work in the pipe.
No more coming out of it.
About 44,000 completions a quarter, roughly 175,000 a year. Hold that pace against the Accord requirement and the gap passes 226,000 homes by the end of 2029.
Rents are up 5.9% a year and vacancy sits at 1.6% (Cotality, June quarter 2026), and because a home finishing in 2028 has to be approved today, the pipeline puts the next two to three years of supply in plain sight. That is the takeaway: tight supply is a known condition, and the advantage goes to buyers who plan their timing and home loan financing around it. On the supply side, the stock in that pipeline is delivered on development and construction finance, so how freely that funding flows shapes how quickly the squeeze eases.
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