February 20, 2013

Architectural service industries witness modest gains

A recent report by Statistics Canada estimates that the architectural and landscape architectural service industries in Canada earned combined operating revenues of $3.5 billion in 2011, which represents a marginal increase of 0.3 per cent from 2010.

According to the report, operating expenses increased by 0.1 per cent to just under $3.0 billion, over the same period. As a result, these industries generated a 13.6 per cent profit margin, which is up from 13.4 per cent in 2010.

Architectural services, which is the larger of the two industries, accounted for $3.1 billion, or 90.5 per cent of total revenues. Landscape architectural services accounted for the remaining 9.5 per cent.

In terms of revenue growth, architectural services increased by 0.5 per cent from 2010 to 2011, while landscape architectural services fell by 0.8 per cent.

The majority of the sales for the combined industries were derived from non-residential building projects (62.0 per cent).

Residential building projects generated 18.3 per cent of the sales. The remaining sales came from landscape architecture, urban planning and other related services.

For non-residential building projects, health care projects, such as hospitals and nursing homes generated the most sales (12.4 per cent).

Educational building projects such as schools, colleges and universities ranked second and generated 11.9 per cent of sales, which is down from 14.0 per cent in 2010. Although office buildings continued to rank third, their share of sales grew to 11.2 per cent in 2011 from 9.8 in 2010. Residential building projects had almost twice as much business from multi-family residential projects (12.0 per cent) than from single family residential projects (6.3 per cent).

The industry earned more than half of its sales from the business sector (51.5 per cent), compared with 36.9 per cent from governments and public institutions.

The remaining 11.6 per cent came mostly from households and partly from foreign clients.

As in previous years, most of the businesses providing architectural services were located in Ontario, which accounted for 39.6 cent of the operating revenues in Canada.

Quebec generated 20.6 per cent, followed by British Columbia (15.8 per cent) and Alberta (14.4 per cent).

JOC NEWS SERVICE

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