Last year at this time, Red Deer had fewer housing starts than any of Alberta’s seven biggest urban centres. This year, it trails only Calgary and Edmonton.

As of May 31, Red Deer had accumulated 311 residential construction starts this year, including 171 single-detached projects, according to statistics released on Tuesday by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

That five-month tally put the city ahead of Lethbridge (279), the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (211), Grande Prairie (172) and Medicine Hat (118). Calgary had 3,932 and Edmonton 4,428.

During the same period in 2009, Red Deer had just 95 housing starts, with 77 of these single-detached homes.

This May, work was started on 57 homes in the city: 53 single-detached and 14 multi-family units. That’s up from May 2009, when there were 14 single-detached and eight multi-family projects started.

Alberta’s seven largest centres combined for 2,127 housing starts in May, as compared with 962 last May. All were higher this year.

Across Canada, new home construction slowed last month as compared with April.

“While the May level of starts is the lowest so far this year, it’s still above where we see activity for all of 2010,” said Bank of Montreal’s deputy chief economist Douglas Porter.

Economists have widely predicted a slowdown in the Canadian housing market in the second half of 2010, after consumers pushed sales forward into the latter half of 2009 and the early part of 2010 to enter the market ahead of tougher new mortgage rules and an anticipated interest rate hike.

Most economists now predict that home prices will either remain flat or fall in the rest of the year and into 2011.

The Canadian Real Estate Association last week lowered its 2010 national forecast for resale transactions following a weaker than anticipated start to the year in some provinces, mainly British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta.