Standing the Test of Time: How to Adapt Your Home Building Career
These are unprecedented times to be in the construction industry. It is one of the hottest markets to be involved in right now. This is mainly because the demand is outweighing the supply.
Standing the Test of Time: How to Adapt Your Home Building Career
Normally, this is the dream scenario all businesses pray for. However, the construction industry’s lack of supplies is not allowing them to meet their demands on many projects. This can be extremely frustrating to home-builders that have the customers but are being handcuffed by labor and supply shortages due to the pandemic.
On average around the country, we are seeing investors snatching up homes wherever they can. They are doing this aggressively because there is a shortage of existing homes for sale. Material costs for residential construction are now up 12% year over year, according to the National Association of Home Builders, so these investors are picking up pure gold.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know if this trend is here to stay or about to phase out. Access to supplies and labor seems almost as impossible to predict as the pandemic itself. So if home builders are unable to complete their projects due to these issues continuing to be a concern, what do they do to move forward in their careers?
Here are some ways that home builders can choose to maybe adapt the path of their career should the shortages in labor and materials continue.
Look outside the box
When you reference the career of a home builder, you think of a person who builds a home. While this is technically true, there is much more that goes into building a home than just “building the home.”
Prices for new and existing homes are at record levels, so many of your customers are not going to have the money to build or completely remodel an entire home. So how do you stay relevant in this industry during these difficult times? You need to be able to offer your customers something that will satiate that desire they seek until you can absolutely fulfill their dreams.
This could be done by remodeling part of the inside of the home or adding on to the home to give additional living space. Another way could be to focus on improving the outside. Get them excited by building a great outdoor event or workspace for them.
Hopefully, by focusing on something that can happen now, they can patiently wait to completely remodel or feel as though they are improving their home to sell when they are ready to build their new one. Either way, you are doing what you can to make that customer happy and not lose them as a customer on a more lucrative job in the future.
Continue your education
Whether you have been building homes for many years or just getting started, it is apparent that the industry, just like many others, is entering into new territories. Depending on the structure that you are building, there are new requirements and guidelines for safety. Some of these regulations have been mandated by governments, while others are just owners trying to be prepared should we encounter any similar incidents in the future.
In many states, it is required that you take continuing education classes in order to renew your license each year. If you are not in a state that requires a yearly renewal, it would still be wise to take some refresher courses. Unless you have specifically done extensive research for yourself, there might be new techniques out there that could help you stand out and take on new types of projects.
In addition, if you are not aware of any new rules or regulations, you could leave yourself vulnerable to hefty fines and possibly the loss of your license.
Think green
Skyrocketing prices, material shortages, and lack of labor; have many people on edge. People don’t like to feel that way. When the world doesn’t work as it should, it begins to feel out of control. So you need to find a way for your customers to feel as though they can be part of a solution.
Protecting the earth is an issue that is never going to go away, and is a cause taken up by most people. As you are having to present these outrageous prices for projects, try to soften the blow by offering green products.
There are numerous building materials out there that are made to be solar or produced from recycled materials. If your customer centers on the fact that they might be doing something to help the environment, they might not focus on the price tag.
Although this article was written with the assumption that you might need to adapt your career to combating the side effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the home building industry, adaptation for any reason is not a bad idea.
It is how species survive changing environments. So being prepared to adapt whether it turns out to be necessary or not, just might put you ahead going forward.
