Shovels down

County building in three charts

In 2025, new homebuilding in Prince Edward County extended a downward trend that has persisted for several years. Sadly, the data provide no signal that this trend will end in 2026.

NEW HOMEBUILDING
Since 2022, new home starts have pulled back each year in Prince Edward County. Last year, just 96 new home permits were issued. Only 75 of these were single detached homes—the remainder (21) were second suites. Not since 2014 has the sector produced as few homes as it did last year.

While municipal council members tout development subdivision agreements as evidence of growth, the actual numbers paint a different story. The County has seen new home construction this depressed only six times in the past 27 years.

CONSTRUCTION VALUE
But this story isn’t limited to new homebuilding. Building generally is trending downward in Prince Edward County. The value of construction, of all types, has been on a steady decline since 2022, except in 2024, when the permit to build a new hospital in Picton boosted performance that year.

ALL BUILDING PERMITS
Meanwhile, the number of all building permits issued by Shire Hall continued to slide in 2025, from 1,076 in 2021 to just 565 last year. Simply put, there is less building activity happening in the County. Fewer homes, industrial buildings, and agricultural buildings. Fewer sheds, decks and renovations.

The County experience echoes a trend broadly felt across Canada—but the impact may be greater here. Shire Hall spent a great deal of money on the assumption that a building boom was “imminent”. Now that the boom has become a bust, it is existing residents who will pay the bill.

WHAT IT MEANS
Until early last year, Shire Hall officials, along with several council members, proclaimed loudly that 4,200 new homes would be built by 2032. Another 4,500 were coming in the decade after that. They asserted their belief with certainty and charts. Full page advertisements.

To do this, the new homebuilding sector would have to build at least 525 new units per year. Last year, fewer than a hundred permits were issued. The average new homebuilding rate over the previous 27 years is 125 units. The most productive year in the last three decades, 2017, saw 178 new homes built. It was always a fantasy. But the story was repeated often and ever more stridently.

The forecasts of a new homebuilding boom were used to support equally fantastical waterworks infrastructure schemes—including the trunklines currently burrowing across Wellington.

Shire Hall has already committed $50 million to expanding the waterworks in Wellington based upon faulty assumptions. It had planned to spend more than $300 million to extend Wellington water to Picton.

The municipal folks who made these decisions are gone now. Yet these zombie spending plans continue to lurk in the background, churning consulting fees and consuming staff resources. There is a big mess to clean up. A sober reassessment is needed. It is existing residents, sadly, who are left to pay the bills.

In 2025, new homebuilding fell well below the average rate since 1998. Past cycles in Prince Edward County suggest it could take another year or two to work out a bottom.