It takes a village to build a house. Apart from your team, you leverage a network of subcontractors, vendors, and trade partners to assist in the building process. With increased housing demand there has been increased demand for skilled laborers leading to higher costs and longer lead times. You can help mitigate these problems by focusing on building relationships with your building partners.
Current residential construction labor landscape
Now that lumber prices are finally on the decline, we can turn to the next item on the agenda: labor (or lack thereof). The housing boom that resulted from the Coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns created material supply shortages and appliance backorders while revealing the gap in skilled laborers. According to a recent survey by the Home Builders Institute, the construction industry faces a 200,000 worker shortfall. The importance of that gap is highlighted by NAHB’s projections that by 2030 the residential construction industry will lose 41% of the skilled laborers needed.
With labor shortfalls and increased demand, skilled workers are hard to come by and harder to schedule. Because of this, it’s vitally important for businesses to create great relationships with their current or prospective trade partners, subcontractors, and vendors. By fostering great relationships, building and remodeling companies can put themselves in the best position to have their work prioritized and scheduled by partners with a growing backlog of work requests.
How CoConstruct can help
Build great relationships with trade partners, subcontractors, and vendors by being easy to work with, providing clear specifications and project details, and by paying your partners on time.
Be easy to work with
With CoConstruct’s communication features, vendors can easily get all the information they need right in their inbox and reply with any questions or updates. Without a barrage of text messages to sort through, you can save your partner’s time by centralizing all your project communication in an online portal. Once your building partners are awarded a bid and added to the project schedule, they will receive automatic updates as the schedule changes. This instant communication ensures that your vendors will always know when they are needed on the job site and that you value their time and work enough to keep them in the loop.
Provide clear project details
Save your subcontractors time and frustration in tracking down loose ends or questions by providing them everything they need upfront. With CoConstruct’s bidding features, you can negotiate scope of work and pricing with your building partners. Clearly work out what work is expected, and how much you will pay to avoid confusion and frustration on the part of your subcontractors later.
Pay on time, every time
The quickest way to ensure a building partner doesn’t want to work with you again is to have them waiting around to get paid for their work. To make sure this doesn’t happen to your business, CoConstruct’s purchase order features help get bills paid on time. Track all of your purchase order information including balances paid and unpaid to ensure that you don’t short your partners. If your CoConstruct account is integrated with QuickBooks, you can create a new bill in QuickBooks from verified work on a purchase order to streamline your process even further.
Don’t give your building partners a reason to not want to work with you in the future. Instead, create a delightful experience using technology to keep them informed, happy, and paid for their contributions to your projects.
