What Are the Biggest Day-to-Day Challenges Contractors Face in Home Construction?
ConradT
| Posted in Construction Techniques on
Hi everyone,
I keep seeing articles about high interest rates and labor shortages affecting the construction industry, but they often only scratch the surface. I’m really interested in hearing directly from professionals in the field:
What are main challenges contractors and developers are dealing with on daily basis while building homes?
Thanks in advance!
Replies
Where to start. The things that annoy me the most about being a builder are what I call barriers to work. By that I mean all the hoops I need to jump through just to go to work.
Workers Comp- I live in NY. To work as a sub I have to carry WC for myself at a cost of over 5k a year.
Licensing- There is no state license so I have to get one for every country I want to work in. If you want to work in the Hamptons even though it’s in Suffolk county, your Suffolk license is no good there and you need yet another license. The 2 counties I carry cost about $750 a year.
Also getting a license. Nassau County took 8 months to process my application. They rejected it 4 times. Each time for a different reason. I was only able to get it once i started going once a week and asking about it. This was after waiting 9 months for my LLC paperwork to come through. Overall it was about a year and a half to get all my paperwork in order to work.
Tax reporting- I have to file quarterly taxes for sales tax because capital improvements are different from repairs. I still don’t quite understand this but repair work you’re supposed to charge sales tax for materials. But not for repairs part of a capital improvement.
This is my biggest gripe as a builder, all the red tape to get to work. In general the license and building departments do little to improve building quality, they just seem to want your money.
In terms of actually building I just find that people are not properly trained or passionate about building. Lots of guys don’t seem to care much about their work, are not continuing to educate themselves and striving to get better. The general attitude is get it done and get out not build it to last.