(Recasts on housing, adds comments from Q&A) OTTAWA, March 23 (Reuters) - The Bank of Canada is concerned that “fear of missing out” may be driving some gains in Canada’s red-hot housing market, a deputy governor said on Tuesday, adding that the central bank will provide more housing analysis in the coming weeks. The central bank is still trying to understand just how much excess exuberance is driving housing price gains, Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle said, responding to audience questions after a speech to financial professionals. “One of the concerns were having is there’s starting to be ‘fear of missing out’, FOMO, and that might driving some of the expectations,” Gravelle said. Last month, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem warned that Canada’s housing market was starting to show signs of “excess exuberance.” The average selling price of a Canadian home jumped 25% in February, compared with a year earlier, as prices to continued to escalate sharply amid surging demand. The hotter-than-expected housing market is one of the factors that prompted the Bank of Canada to revise up its outlook for economic activity in the first quarter of 2021, said Gravelle. “We’ll have more analysis in our May (Financial System Review) and we’re also putting out, in the next couple of weeks ... an annotated chart package in terms of the housing indicators we’re looking at,” he said. Gravelle earlier said the BoC would wind down several programs introduced during the COVID-19 crisis to support market functioning and said the central bank was looking at how it could adjust its quantitative easing (QE) program. “Regarding our ongoing purchases of (Government of Canada) bonds, Governing Council is evaluating how the process of adjusting these could unfold,” he said. “Adjusting the pace of QE purchases won’t necessarily mean that we have changed our views about when we will need to start raising the policy interest rate,” Gravelle added. The Bank of Canada has pledged to keep interest rates at the effective lower bound of 0.25% until the economic slack is absorbed, which is not expected until into 2023 under current projections. The Bank will update those projections in April. Gravelle made clear that as the Canadian economy improves, the central bank will gradually dial back the amount of QE it is adding, to get to a pace that maintains, but no longer increases, the amount of stimulus. “We would be easing our foot off the accelerator, not hitting the brakes,” he said. The Canadian dollar was trading at 1.2526 to the greenback, or 79.83 U.S. cents, having clawed back its earlier decline following the speech. ($1 = 1.2533 Canadian dollars) (Reporting by Julie Gordon in Ottawa and Fergal Smith in Toronto; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Marguerita Choy)