Housing starts in the Calgary region continued their precipitous drop from last year's lofty levels, according to April data released Friday by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

Single-detached starts were at the lowest level for the month of April since 1987, while multiple-family starts were the lowest for the month since 1996.

A lower demand environment persists in the Calgary region, said Lai Sing Louie, senior market analyst in Calgary for CMHC.

"Market conditions still continue to favour buyers,"he said. "People looking out there will find incentives on new homes. If you look around now, the same money this year will buy you more house than last year."

However, an environment of slower economic growth as well as job uncertainty continues to affect the housing market.

"People are a little more cautious in terms of buying just because of the way the labour market is," said Louie. "But on the other hand, we are seeing the equity markets start to have a good move in the last month. There is some wealth creation going on. And mortgage rates are at a very low rate now.

"So if someone has the financial ability to do so and the confidence, they can get good pricing and a good product right now in this marketplace."

Last month in the Calgary census metropolitan area, single-detached starts amounted to only 234 units, down by 30.4 per cent from the 336 units recorded in April 2008.

Multiple-family starts plunged by 88.6 per cent to only 87 units in April compared with 760 starts a year ago.

And total housing starts in the Calgary region were off by 70.7 per cent to only 321 units in April compared with 1,096 in April 2008.

A bright spot was that in the single-detached market, starts increased by nearly 37 per cent in April from March's 171 units.However, the multi-family sector dropped by nearly 31 per cent on a monthly basis from 126 units in March.

"April housing starts (for single-detached homes) are an improvement from this March, which was not the case last year," said Louie.

However, after four months of production this year, single-detached starts have reached 793 units, down 43.5 per cent from the same period in 2008 when they totalled 1,403 units.

Louie said that, a year ago, there were some large apartment condo-minium projects accounting for most of the starts in that area.

Year-to-date in the multi-family sector, there have been 274 starts, down 93.7 per cent from the same period in 2008 when they were at 4,349 starts.

The Calgary census metropolitan area includes the city, Airdrie, the Municipal District of Rocky View, Chestermere, Cochrane, Irricana, Beiseker and Crossfield.

Housing starts across Alberta's seven largest centres totalled 794 units in April, down 61 per cent from the 2,034 units started a year ago.

Todd Hirsch, senior economist with ATB Financial in Calgary, said the Alberta starts were the first monthly increase since October 2008.

"This could be a very tentative first signal that recently plummeting provincial residential construction activity has finally begun to stabilize, albeit at a very low level," he said.

Nationally, housing starts fell a worse-than-expected 19.9 per cent in April to 117,400 annualized units, their slowest pace since 1996.