Home builders live and work in a strange, surreal world. It's a world where split-second 75-cent missteps on a job site can turn into tens of thousands of dollars (or more) of exposure and construction defect litigation later.
There are not enough new homes being built today, which makes the prices of houses--new and resale--too high, and holds back the overall economy. But code, regulation, and a still-depleted universe of skilled craftsmen and women are an increasingly daunting obstacle. Builders don't only have to worry about getting their projects done on time and on budget when they look at risk related to the 25 or more different trade crews that team up on each home built. Where they really lose sleep is over getting their projects done right.
National Association of Home Builders chief economist Robert Dietz unpacks the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) analysis here with positive news about progress the industry is making in hiring back workers. Dietz writes that unfilled jobs in residential construction ticked down in the right direction in the latest report, as hiring picked up.
Over the last 12 months home builders and remodelers have added 128,000 jobs on a net basis. Since the low point of industry employment following the Great Recession, residential construction has gained 701,000 positions.
Dietz notes that home builder and remodeler hiring growth has built up a healthy head of steam, averaging 17,000 workers a month for the past six months.
Still, most builders look at the months ahead with more fear and anxiety related to "labor" than almost any other of the known sources of risk.
That's not just about getting able bodies to job sites and paying them the going wage for their work. It's at least partly about what happens later, when there's a family living in that house, and that house lives up to the promise of the builder or not.
Tedd Benson, a Walpole, N.H.-based home builder who's trying to strike a unique, delicate balance between highly-skilled, artisanal craftswork performed by passionately-committed humans and machine-learning automated tools, has a great deal of wisdom about this issue we call housing's "labor shortage." We're mistaken if we focus on this issue as a headcount challenge, Tedd says:
"The industry has a skills problem that more than rivals the labor problem ... (But I must add, all building trades should be defined more by the skills involved rather than the labor. It's not just bodies; it's also hearts and minds.) But the main point here is that nothing will ever replace highly skilled tradespeople doing their work in traditional ways. There just aren't enough of such people today and the next generation seems to have other interests.
I don't disagree with Tedd. People who work are generally happier people--at work and otherwise--when they're proud and committed and caring about what they're working on. Someone who works passionately can look to others as if he or she is working very hard. The thing is, the problem that Tedd puts his finger on--the scarcity of people who are highly skilled, mightily disciplined, perfection-seeking artisans--may also contain at least part of the solution: Young people want jobs that are about purpose, the pursuit of perfection, tangible outcomes, and ultimately, the blend of advanced technology and human proficiency.
Here, thanks to the generosity of our sister title Journal of Light Construction, we have borrowed the services of writer Charlie Wardell, who dials in contractors, engineers, consultants, and home inspectors to gather our line-up of the "11 Most Common Callbacks." Who's not familiar, for instance, with the issue below?
“Whoever did the framing layout didn’t take the weight of that granite into account, so the kitchen floor ended up settling and sloping toward the island, like a little bowl,” he says. The builder had to go back, jack the floor up, and triple the joists.
As for the hugely expensive stucco problems plaguing builders in Florida right now, Wardell writes:
One problem with stucco is the same as many of the other callbacks in this article: the industry has lost its best craftsmen. “We don’t see the skilled labor that we used to.”
Missing joints, too much sand in the mix, or poorly hydrated stucco are those $.75 an hour kinds of issues that can turn into five, six, or seven-figure problems later. Which supports Tedd Benson's assertion ... "Houston, we don't just have a labor problem; we have a skills problem."
