Lawyer and analyst Barry LePlater noted on the website CURT: “The construction industry will exit from the pandemic at the early stages of a $35 trillion construction boom resulting from pent-up demand, governmental intervention, and changing U.S. demographics. But before addressing the good news to come, contractors will need to grapple with key financial constraints either caused or exacerbated by the pandemic.” Since he wrote in May, the market has further exploded1 … [s]o architects, who are always riding the roller coaster of construction volatility, have seen that thrill ride become insane and dangerous.
When COVID-19 hit in March of 2020, there was a deep depression of cancelled projects. A loud bust after experiencing a growing market after the 2008 Building Bust of the Great Recession. Silent phones. Laid off employees. Then something happened. Months of isolation made people rethink the way they wanted to live. That meant their buildings would change. That meant construction, and architects became useful again, after being abandoned. But the craziness of a new era has made all builders and architects simultaneously empowered by their new in-demand status while fully threatened by costs and availability of all the products and people necessary to build.
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- 1. I am an architect, and this insane year of wild swings of cost and unprecedented scheduling impossibilities in the construction industry has yet to be fully understood. One contractor that I work with had three concrete suppliers simply dishonor their contract with him to get to higher paying projects dangled in front of them, so he is now building his own forms and becoming his own “concrete guy.” A project using generic steel bar joists that you see in every Big Box Store roof went to bid and, voila – no bar joists in America are available for the forthcoming year, so the owner had to pay for a new specification. Another project has a builder simply asking for add after add to his stipulated sum, fixed price contract simply because “COVID made me do it” (Can you spell “dispute?”)