Cost of Construction material.

At work, for some reason I'm the one from the engineering department that deals with rehab work for our 52 sites. New construction is done by other engineers and inspectors. Since Hurricane Sandy I've had over 10 large roofs replaced, new 100Kw generators replaced and so on. The trend I've been hearing lately after awarding the job to the lowest bidder is can I buy the material now, and place it on the job site - sometimes up to a month before the work is to proceed because as the building materials are rising through the roof in the past month or two. The contractors when putting in their bids consults with the material companies and are getting two prices, one if you buy now, and what the price will be in 30 days. I can see this killing the start of new construction if this trend continues.

Seems like material goes up after every disaster. Supply and demand. Trouble is that once it's up it seems to stay there. I sometime wonder if it's an excuse to permanently raise prices.

Funny how the the industry likes to take advantage of other peoples misfortunes. And we wonder why insurance prices are through the roof.

It will come dowm.
Can't tell you how many times OSB went up to $12-14/sheet and then fall back into the $7-8 range.

It's probably just my poor timing then. Built a 12x24 shed. I remember doing some pricing before I started and figured it wouldn't cost too much if I did much of the work myself. Then Karena (if that's how you spell that hurricane) came along. The cost of the shed almost doubled . Seems like every time I get the urge to do something there is a hike in material cost. I need to check the almanac before I get ideas.

And I just noticed the new smiley. gg is on top of things.

I was going to build a chest for the front of my horse trailer. Nothing much just enough to hold water buckets, containers to put water in, shovel, pitch fork, broom, extra bag of shavings but dang it's not worth it with all the left over there would be and no use for it.

Diesel Dan wrote:

It will come dowm.
Can't tell you how many times OSB went up to $12-14/sheet and then fall back into the $7-8 range.

+1 ...... though long term the price of everything will go up given the policies of the Federal goobermint and the Federal Reserve- inflation by any other name.

7/16 OSB was <$8 per sheet about a year ago and is now back up to >$14.
It is amazing how stable lumber has been with the housing collapse. When there is no disaster to recover from the mills are cutting costs as much as possible just to keep volume up to keep them open.

It's a boom and bust cycle. When Charlie hit the roofers went crazy overcharging for everything ($1000 to replace three boots and 18 shingles. didi it myself for $30.) and then begged for work for the two years after al the reconstruction was done.

The next big boom will be in sales. All the reconstruction will raise the value of the properties so people will try to cash in.