The cost of housing’s labor shortages is going up.
There’s no reason not to expect the price tag to do anything other than get higher.
Builders normally rank land–access to building lots–as their biggest source of anxiety, and why not? It’s scarce. It’s expensive. It comes with rules that suck time and talent to deal with.
They’re used to those challenges and that source of worry, as well as the longstanding issue of securing capital to buy and develop those lots, and to finance construction. What they’re not used to in the past couple of business and housing cycles anyway, is this post Great Recession challenge: a lack of human resources to do jobs that require skills for a predictable rate that maps to a profitable margin on a finished project…read more