The State of Construction in Florida?
“Why is it so hard to find quality contractors these days?”
Florida is known as a "perpetual growth state," meaning that people continue to move here every year despite outside environmental and worldly circumstances. Because of this, the demand for contracting and roofing services also continues to grow.
This increased population is not the only reason for high demand - the recent hurricanes affecting the entire state have caused extreme amounts of damage. The construction industry is faced with the massive undertaking of rebuilding Florida. With demand being so high, it is hard to receive timely, quality service these days.
As a homeowner or business owner, is difficult to vet out companies you are partnering with to determine if they actually know what they are doing - and that can be scary. In the past month alone, I have witnessed some impressively bad installations in my field, like the following:
Below is a tar and gravel roof system installation conducted in 2021. The issue here is that contractors cannot conduct a liquid-applied roof system without a flat substrate to adhere to. If one piece of gravel moves, it will break the coating and void the entire layer, which is exactly what happened. This roof has leaked since installation and the contractor is “no longer honoring the warranty.”
An AC contractor miss-measured while installing the rails which support the AC unit. Instead of remeasuring for correct installation, they decided to leave it like this.
In their February newsletter, The Construction Dive released several interesting stats underscoring beliefs that soon, the construction industry will be stretched thin to support the associated demand and quality will be hard to come by.
Labor is bleak. To meet demand, contractors will need to hire an estimated 546,000 workers in 2023, and that’s in addition to the industry’s normal pace of hiring, according to a new analysis by Associated Builders and Contractors.
In 2022, the industry averaged more than 390,000 job openings per month, the highest level on record. Construction’s unemployment rate of 4.6% for 2022 was the second lowest ever, indicating there are few construction workers seeking jobs, and therefore the pool to fill demand is shallow.
With nearly one in four construction workers older than 55, retirements will continue to whittle away at the construction workforce. Many of these older construction workers are also the most productive, refining their skills over time.
The number of construction laborers, the most entry-level occupational title, has accounted for nearly 4 out of every 10 new construction workers since 2012.
The number of workers with licensed skills has grown at a much slower pace, or, in the case of jobs like carpenters, actually declined in the last decade.
Demand and funding for megaprojects such as chip manufacturing plants, clean energy facilities, and infrastructure will continue to worsen the problem — though construction is seeing money pouring into projects, it means more work to find the people to build them. And it won’t get much easier.
ABC predicts that in 2024, the industry will need to hire 324,000 new workers on top of its normal pacing, and that assumes construction spending slows significantly.
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