Doug Porter actually sounded a little surprised at how the housing industry — and consumers — have shrugged off the economic downturn.

OK, maybe shrugged off might be stretching it a bit, but the downtime that infiltrated the housing industry wasn’t as brutal as many thought.

“Buyers really looked across the valley of the recession,” he told an early morning audience at a recent real estate and economic seminar in Calgary.

Demand was off dramatically during 2008 after consumers decided the time wasn’t right to make any moves because of economic uncertainty that included job losses.

“If you’re not sure about your job future, you’re not going to go out and buy a house,” is the way Cal Wenzel, founder of Shane Homes, put it to me recently.

But ever since about March of this year, confidence in the marketplace started to rebound.

Consumers loosened the grip on their wallets — thanks to historically low mortgage rates and reduced house prices — and have reentered the home ownership market.

“They saw a combination of a little bit of a dip in prices and very low rates as a good long-term opportunity,” said Porter, who was part of a panel discussion on the local real estate market.

Calgarians being Calgarians — people who somehow manage to see a bright side to almost every situation — they looked at the downturn as an opportunity.

“At the end of the day, buyers just viewed this as basically a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get into ownership — and I think that’s why the market turned, and turned so aggressively,” said Porter. And how it has turned. In September, single detached homebuilders in Calgary started work on 616 homes, twice the number from the same month in 2008, says Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

On the strength of that number, builders were rapidly closing the percentage gap between January to September | and the same period last year, which now sits at just nine per cent.

Back in April, the gap was at its widest at 44 per cent, but has been narrowing ever since.

On the resale side, things have flattened out in the past couple of months at between 1, 200 and 1,300 sales, but that’s still more than double the activity in January.

So far this year, July was the busiest month with slightly more than 1,800 homes changing hands.

“The correction in the Calgary housing market appears to be stabilizing,” says Diane Scott, president-elect of the Calgary Real Estate Board.

The only downside to Calgary housing is the lack of multifamily construction.

Builders and developers are busy paring down their standing inventory before deciding to take on new projects.

“I’m going to let the market decide when I’ll build something else,” was the comment of one builder with whom I spoke.

That being said, six smaller projects have received building permit approval from the city to get going. When that will happen, though, is another matter.

Looking at housing from a macro perspective, Porter said he and other economists were surprised how quickly the housing market began to turn around considering the overall weakness of Alberta’s economy.

In an interview with the Herald, Porter said “Alberta’s actually seen the biggest rise in its jobless rate of any province in the country from its lows over the past year, but be that as it may, that affects less than 10 per cent of the population.

“The rest of the population that still has a job just saw this as a tremendous opportunity — and seized that opportunity.”

A socio-economic report from the City of Calgary says the city’s economy is turning for the better, but “the course will be slow and steady — contracting 2.5 per cent this year before regaining most of that lost ground in 2010.”

Residential construction projects are “rising again after significant weakness in the past year, which is a positive sign,” says city economist Patrick Walters. “Calgary’s local economy will continue to strengthen as global economies begin to recover.”