Doomers please welcome Kat Sanders, who has been kind enough to submit the following general commentary on the Home Builders to Housing Doom. Kat blogs at her Construction Management Degree blog and, within that site, at The Fixer-Upper Blog. She invites your comments and questions either below in the comments or at her email address katsanders25@gmail.com.
It’s not a good time to be connected in any way to the real estate or construction industry. The recent subprime crisis and the disastrous consequences that followed have taken its toll on everyone connected in any way to the real estate and building industries, and as recent statistics portray, there is no sign of a let up any time soon. A look at the figures shows that:
The solutions to these problems may not be easily visible now, especially with the economy still struggling to look up. The only way to tide over this crisis is to cut costs and hope to stay in business till things start to look better. There have been reports that prices in the housing sector have bottomed out and that there are signs of revival in the market. If that is true and if these early trends show promises of continuing, then the problems that the construction industry is facing will solve themselves.
Well, what do Doom readers think of all that? Twist and I would be most interested in thoughts about how you are seeing your own areas in relation to Kat’s fairly broad assertions.
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No new info. here.
* More than 60,000 workers in the construction industry have lost their jobs
* There is an increasing shortage of skilled workmen and labor.
Shouldn’t the laid off ones drop down and fill these “shortages”.The shortage is a laughable myth.
Construction is in 2 worlds.Residential and commercial.
Res. was fed by easy money/credit orgy and will bottom in 2015.
Commercial is not much better (I was in that business 20 years).
Overall , a article written at the level of anyone that reads the “doom”.
No new info. here.
I bet she was a Realtor before starting her cute little “blog”.
“It’s not a good time to be connected in any way to the real estate or construction industry.”
There are still a few real estate-related opportunities. A growing supply of REOs ensures that preservation mechanics will fare well for the next half-dozen years, at least.
“More than 60,000 workers in the construction industry have lost their jobs.”
This figure would be higher if it included illegal aliens, whose continued presence (albeit in other industries) will have a depressing effect on wages in the same way that outmigration from the farms to the cities has had for Chinese factory workers.
I expect to we’re going to see a long recession and a moribund housing market.
Not much here new…. four brand new local strip malls, completely empty, unfinished or up for sale. A second-time foreclosure down my street by the Willamette river … listed for 500k, down from 800k…. three older, large homes with Mt. Hood views … all in foreclosure, all on the same street, all in a row. Last high selling price was about 2.5 million, now asking 700k, average.
Huge megachurch plot in Interstate 205 cleared two years ago, parking lot started…. no further action for almost two years…
Abandoned 750k house on my street .. a McMansion, of course.. Empty lots being sold as ‘developable property’ … all within a four mile radius of my house. And I just listed the bigger stuff.
Construction employment? No good anecdotes, just stats. Shortage of skilled labor? You’re kidding, right?
Oh, and lots of school districts laying off employees.
More and more every day I am seeing people from the construction industry who are having to file bankruptcy. I would say this group far exceeds any other right now.