London recorded one of Ontario's steepest residential building-permit declines heading into 2026. That figure is specific to residential permits — this page does not have a sourced institutional-specific number, and says so — alongside the Tarion, HCRA and Construction Act rules that apply to London housing work regardless of the cycle.
Market signals
BuildForce's own account of the year to January 2026 names London among the worst-hit Ontario CMAs for residential building-permit value: down 75% year over year, in the same group as Barrie and Peterborough's 88% declines and Kingston's 85%, against an Ontario-wide residential decline of 13%. This is a genuine, dated, city-specific figure — not the provincial number presented as local. It measures residential permit dollar value specifically, not construction employment and not institutional building activity, which is the distinction the next section addresses directly.
This page's title covers institutional and housing work. The housing half has a real, sourced figure above. For the institutional half, no CMA-level or London-specific figure on institutional construction permits, investment or employment could be sourced from the materials checked. Rather than apply the residential decline to institutional work by assumption, or substitute a provincial or national institutional figure and present it as local, this page states plainly that no institutional-specific London number is available here.
Tarion's statutory warranty limits have moved twice on a stated schedule: for an Agreement of Purchase and Sale signed before 1 February 2021, freehold coverage was capped at $300,000; from 1 February 2021 it stayed at $300,000 but common-elements coverage rose from $50,000 per unit (capped at $2.5 million) to $100,000 per unit (capped at $3.5 million); from 1 July 2023, freehold coverage itself rose to $400,000 while condo-unit coverage held at $300,000. Coverage runs for up to seven years from the date the Agreement of Purchase and Sale is signed, tiered by defect type, and is backstopped by Tarion but provided by the builder. See this piece on Tarion warranty claims for how a claim against that coverage actually gets filed.
A builder of new homes must be licensed as a builder; a seller of new homes must be licensed as a vendor; a builder who both builds and sells must hold the combined builder/vendor licence. A person building a home for their own use on land they own may not need a builder's licence provided they never sell it — but HCRA is explicit that an owner-built home is then not eligible for Tarion warranty coverage at all, and the individual assumes the builder's full role, including workplace safety, permits and subtrade contracts directly.
The 10% holdback and its shift to annual release since 1 January 2026 are province-wide, not London-specific — see Hamilton's industrial-work page for the full mechanic. What is London-specific is the permit-value figure above, and the honest gap in institutional-specific data next to it.
No sourced figure ties the two together. The 75% figure covers residential building permits specifically; this page does not have institutional-specific London data and does not extrapolate one from the other.
HCRA states plainly that an owner-built home is not eligible for Tarion warranty coverage under the Ontario New Home Warranties Plan Act, provided the owner does not sell it after construction — the individual takes on the builder's full role instead.
A 30-minute call is enough to see where AI tracks warranty tiers and licence renewals without manual lookups.
