
A variety of factors contributed to a strong construction year in Kamloops for the first half of 2022.
The City of Kamloops issued over $187 million worth of building permits from January to June, with $38.6 million of that in June alone.
Building and Engineering Development Manager, Jason Dixon, says the projects over the last six months have mainly been on the commercial, industrial, and institutional sides of things.
“There’s a lot of big projects this year, not the hospital size but every month there are really-solid projects, $3 million, $5 million, $8 million, that kind of stuff,” he said. “There’s a lot of money being spent in the community for sure.”
The institutional construction value in Kamloops is already at $64 million this year, compared to just under $4 million last year, explains Dixon.
“A big driver on the institutional side is the renovations at RIH, which was a $46 million permit, and the other one institutionally was TRU was doing upgrades at the science building which was $5.5 million,” he said.
“So sometimes it’s not always a new building, it’s just investments being made in existing buildings and clearly, TRU is doing that with the science building.”
On the residential side of things there were 264 residential permits issued at over $70.3 million for the first half of 2022 versus 307 permits issued at over $60.7 million.
Although the number of residential permits went down for 2022, the dollar value went up, which Dixon says could be from a couple of different factors, including inflation.
“That’s affecting everybody, so we have seen a lot of escalation in the cost of construction.”
“Construction is an easy one for people to look at and I think it’s a good indicator of economic activity in the community and people working and you look at construction as a whole, it’s probably one of the biggest employers in the city.”
While construction trends are looking good for the first half of the year, Dixon explains it’s hard to say what’s in store for the second half of 2022.
“When I look at applications waiting to be processed that we are working on, I think things will continue on the same for a while but whether that goes all the way through to the end of the year is hard to predict at this time.”