COVID and Texas weather has impacted the supply chain, raising costs of construction materials

Construction costs are increasing at historic rates, making for a rapid rise in new home prices. We asked Matt Guelich, Senior Vice President of Robson Communities, about why construction costs are so high and how long before things settle down.

“We’ve seen an increase in sales, getting back to what, we would like to say, at normal levels are. But in the recession that we came out of,  it’s been a tough road to come back out of it. With the impact of COVID on manufacturing and a lot of the supply chain, where the materials are coming from, it’s really had an impact on the price of materials, the ability to produce them and meet the demand, and construction. So, we’re seeing things, just increase in costs and increase in difficulty getting materials,” Guelich said.

COVID not only had an impact on the availability of materials, so did Texas’s large weather storm. “We’ve had to wait on paint for weeks and wait on different products because of the impact of the raw materials that go into several things like final paint glues. And so it hits several different industries and materials,” Guelich said.

Home building has had to adapt during this time. Supplies are taking longer to obtain and can be more expensive, “…there are some of the articles I read across the from the National Association of Home Builders do show different builders handling things different. Some builders have stopped projects, some builders have stopped selling, some builders have stopped building homes, and, and we’ve done a little bit of all that. We’ve slowed down starts to ensure that there’s materials and manpower out there to handle the number of homes that we’re trying to build. And we’ve actually put reductions or caps on ourselves, to limit the number of homes that we have in backlog,” Guelich said.