LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Winter weather usually brings a slowdown for construction season, but for homebuilders, it just means colder conditions for catching up.
The demand for new homes remains high across the U.S., but the pieces to get it all done are still in short supply.
For companies like Schneider Custom Homes, a realistic timeline for a brand new home is a minimum of nine months to a year.
“We used to be a four to five-month build window,” said Andrea Schneider, an owner. “From the time we dug the hole to the day that you could move in was four to five months.”
Other builders like Blake Builders in Lincoln said their normal window of five to six months is now pushed back at least a month due to both labor and supply shortages.
It’s because those shortages keep moving around. Essentials like roof trusses are about 10 weeks behind in production.
“Depending on the complexity and the engineering of that and it’s not just the lumber now its the metal components that go into building that truss,” Schneider said.
It’s a shift from earlier this year, where most of the struggles were in a lumber shortage. Now builders are seeing roadblocks at every turn.
“The reality is it’s pretty much everything from paint to those roof trusses to every component in between that goes into a home,” Schneider said.
It’s not just a Lincoln problem. U.S. Census Bureau data on new residential construction shows completions are falling behind when compared to starts. For single-family homes, it was -3.5% and for multi-family homes, it was -7.5%.
“Because of everything that we know is going on were putting a lot of holes in the ground. I would say some of them won’t even frame until next March,” Schneider said. “Again, that’s just to keep us moving forward because we have such a high demand that we have to do everything we can to keep up with it.”
Meanwhile, housing stats in Lincoln show a continuing hot market. Redfin data for November shows homes for sale in Lincoln were on the market for an average of eight days.
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