While the housing market roared back to life in much of Canada during the last quarter of 2009, the story in Thompson has been somewhat different.

The RE/MAX Bricks and Mortar Report last September found the national bounce back began in early spring 2009 and made the so-called Great Recession one of the shortest on record Canada-wide for real estate.

Over the past 30 years, the Canadian residential real estate market has experienced three major national downturns in 1981, 1989 and 2008, in addition to regional fluctuations at other times.

What exactly the story is for Thompson is a matter of perspective and perhaps whether one sees the cup as half empty or half full. And in the case of the housing market, whether you are a buyer or seller.

Last week, it was a buyer’s bonanza with “Reduced” marked on lots of local “For Sale” signs. There were, by way of a snapshot, more than 90 single family detached homes listed for sale May 6 with real estate brokers and their sales associates in Thompson.

Throw in private sales, which aren’t counted in the figures here, and you have well over 100 homes on the market right now.

Westwood topped the real estate list with 21 homes on the market, followed by Burntwood with 18; Deerwood with 14; Eastwood with 13; Riverside with 10; Southwood with seven and Juniper with five homes for sale.

Little surprise then perhaps that MoneySense magazine, in its widely watched national annual survey last month of 179 of “Canada’s Best Places to Live,” noted housing prices dropped sharply in Thompson from an average of $243,390 last year to $206,454 this year – a 15.17 per cent drop, which is in line with the 20 per cent drop in price some local real estate brokers have talked about. The selling price, of course, is arrived at by the mutual consent of a willing seller and willing buyer. The average house price here was $152,179 in 2008 and $97,333 in 2007.

Given those shift in numbers over the last four years, we aren’t inclined to read too much into last year’s drop in average price here. Noteworthy, yes, certainly. But only time will tell if it was an anomaly – a blip on the local real estate screen, as it were – or the start of a longer-term trend.

If there is anywhere a crystal ball is likely to suddenly turn opaque and make a fool out of pundits and predictions, it is the residential real estate market in Thompson.

There were no new housing starts of any kind in Thompson during the first quarter of 2010, says Calgary-based Richard Corriveau, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) manager of market analysis for the Prairie and Territories Region.

Single detached new home starts decreased 86 per cent last year, plummeting to six, CMHC reported in January, from 43 in 2008.

Multiple family housing starts went from eight in 2008 to none last year. Single family starts went from went from 24 in 2007 to 43 in 2008 – an increase of 79.2 per cent – and the highest number of housing starts in at least six years. Multiple family housing starts went from two in 2007 to eight in 2008, all started in the final quarter.

Combined there were 51 housing starts in Thompson in 2008, compared to 26 in 2007, representing a 96.2 per cent increase.

Corriveau says the last single detached housing starts in Thompson were two in the third quarter of last year. “The last quarter to record multiples was the fourth quarter of 2008 when four semis and four row (townhouse) units were started,” he added.

Gary Ceppetelli, the city’s director of planning and community development, says typically there are no housing starts in Thompson during the first quarter of the year because of cold winter conditions and fourth quarter housing starts can also be in frequent. Most residential construction, he says, in Thompson usually takes place between April 1 and Sept. 30 – the second and third quarters of the year.

While there is some truth to that – especially in relation to the first quarter and winter construction – the fact remains the most dramatic housing construction improvement in recent years here occurred in the fourth quarter of 2008. Statistics released by CMHC showed that 33 single detached homes were started in the final three months of the year, compared to nine for the same period in 2007. None were started in the fourth quarter of 2009, nor were there any multiple family housing starts. In 2008 there were eight, all started in the fourth quarter.

Unfortunately, while the fourth quarter of 2008 was good for local housing starts, it also happened to coincide with the beginning of the so-called Great Recession, which in many parts of the world proved to be the steepest and quickest economic decline since the Great Depression of 1929 to 1937. Within four months, housing starts in Thompson and elsewhere essentially fell off the map.

The silver lining, of course, in the big drop in average home prices in Thompson, is that it has created a buyer’s market – very nice for someone relocating here or one of the city’s many renters looking to buy their first home – by as the MoneySense survey calculated, improving our home ownership affordability from 95th place in 2009 to 57th this year.