How a tight labor market moves your construction schedule

The electrician who told us he could start on the fourth called on the second to say the seventh, and the seventh became the fourteenth. Nothing was wrong with the drawings or the permit. He had four jobs and three crews. In a growing Texas market, that phone call is the most common reason a finish date moves, and a schedule that does not plan for it is a wish with milestones.

Why demand outruns the trade pipeline

Houston, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio have been adding apartments, warehouses, hotels, clinics and homes at the same time, and every one of those buildings needs the same electricians, plumbers, HVAC mechanics and framers. Training a licensed journeyman takes years; opening a new subdivision takes months. When a region builds faster than it trains, the trade that was easy to book in a slow year becomes the trade every general contractor in the metro is calling on the same Monday. The work itself did not get harder. The line to get it done got longer.

Crews you employ do not take other jobs

The plainest defense against a scarce trade market is to employ the crews yourself. We keep our own people for framing, drywall, paint, millwork, tile, stone, concrete, excavation, roofing and glazing, and our own FF&E install crew. On a build-out those trades cover most of the calendar between permit and punch, and none of them can be pulled off your job by a better offer across town, because they work for us. We still hire subcontractors for the licensed mechanical, electrical and plumbing trades and for specialties, which is exactly where the next two sections come in.

Book the trade before the drawings are done

In a tight market the mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractors who do good work are booked months out. Waiting for a final permit set before asking for their schedule means asking for a slot that no longer exists. We bring those subs into pre-construction, give them a preliminary scope and a date range, and get a commitment on the calendar while the architect is still finishing details. The tradeoff is some pricing uncertainty until the set is final, and we explain that to the owner directly. A committed crew with a preliminary number beats a precise number with no crew.

Sequencing and quality when crews are scarce

A schedule that assumes every trade arrives the morning the previous one leaves is drawn for a market that does not exist right now. We build float around the subcontracted trades, keep work in reserve that our own crews can do when a sub slips, and sequence areas so that a delay in one room does not idle the whole floor. On a hotel renovation that means releasing rooms in blocks so a plumber's late week costs one block, not the opening. On a build-out it means framing and drywall keep moving in the front of house while the kitchen waits on gas.

When good crews are booked, the work goes to whoever is available, and whoever is available may be a crew that has never done this type of building. That shows up at the punch walk and in the first year of operation. A principal of our company is on site daily and checks the work as it goes in, and the trades our own employees perform are done by people whose habits we know. Holding quality in a tight market is mostly a matter of who is watching and who is doing.

Questions to ask before you sign

Ask your contractor which trades on your project are their own employees and which are subcontracted. Ask whether the subcontracted trades have already committed dates to your job or only to a bid. Ask what the schedule does if the electrician slips two weeks. Ask who, by name, will be on site every day to catch the slip before it becomes a month. The answers will tell you more about your opening date than the bar chart will.

The owner of the company is on your site and holds the calendar personally, and the crews that carry most of the work answer to us, not to the next job. Send over your plans and the date you need to open, and we will tell you which trades we cover, which we need to book now, and whether the date holds.