This couple isn’t the only one to see its nest-feathering plans go awry. Thanks to rising incomes and plummeting mortgage rates, new-home sales scored another monthly high last week, setting the stage for a third straight record year. And remodeling has become a $130 billion business nationwide, eclipsing new-home building in dollar volume. It’s all great news for the economy–but not such great news if you want to take some of your Wall Street winnings off the table to hire a contractor and build something. Everybody’s already tied up.
Pam Sessions, the owner of Atlanta developer Hedgewood Properties, knows all about that. Hedgewood built 300 homes in 1998, priced from $190,000 to $710,000. Sessions is shooting for 400 this year. But the time it takes her to build a house in the labor-squeezed market has grown from four and a half months in 1994 to six months now. All her sub- contractors–framers, electricians, bricklayers–are struggling to keep quality workers. Her cabinetmaker got so sick of the strain last year that she says he chose to go out of business. That brought a four-week halt to all Sessions’s projects. She had hoped to finish 14 houses in 1998 at Edmund Park, a new subdivision near Emory University in central Atlanta, but ended the year with just six complete and six more underway. More than half of the workers at the subdivision are Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, industrious and often highly skilled migrants willing to work 10-hour days six days a week. How does Bob Courtney, Hedgewood’s builder on site, communicate with his workers? With difficulty, says Courtney, who knows two Spanish words–““si and Andale, which I believe means faster.''
Novelist Tom Wolfe, fresh from 11 years of waxing lyrical on Georgia, doesn’t rule out the fantastic notion that Atlanta will eclipse New York and London some time in the late 21st century, as surely as London and New York eclipsed Rome. Whether you buy that or not, Roman roads weren’t built in a day, and Atlanta’s won’t be either. At C.W. Matthews Contracting Co., a suburban road builder with 630 employees, backlogs are running at the highest levels in the company’s 53-year history. ““We’re all fighting for the same handful of people,’’ says personnel manager Ray Rodriguez. To cope, the company added a 401(k) plan in 1997, raised the pay rate for beginning laborers from $6.70 to $7.75 in 1998, bought vans to provide free daily commutes from as far away as northern Alabama and guaranteed 35 hours of wages per week even if weather stops work. Even so, Rodriguez is short at least 75 experienced tradespeople–including truck drivers and heavy-equipment operators.
Which brings us back to the lawyer and his wife, as they ease at last into their porch furniture in balmy January. They leave you with this advice. Don’t automatically take the lowest bid–and whatever you do, don’t hire their original contractor. By the way, the view out the back looks great.
