“Labor Shortages Are Not Going Away…”

The Associated General Contractors of America just released a survey of 88 construction firms in CO to learn more about the labor market. Ken Simonson, chief economist with the AGC said, “Labor shortages are not going away anytime soon.” Here is a summary of what they found—

• 92% of them need to hire more skilled craft workers in the next 12 months.
• 80% of them are having a hard time filling some or all of their open positions.
• Electricians, carpenters, installers, pipelayers, and general laborers are the toughest craft positions to fill in CO.
• Nearly 75% of them said trying to find an electrician today is harder than it was a year ago. 73% said the same thing about finding carpenters.
• Of the brand new workers to the industry they are hiring 51% of them described their training as poor and 34% described it as fair. This means employers have to spend a lot of time and money training their new employees.
• Nearly 70% of the contractors are worried that their new applicants can pass a drug test and 67% are worried they can’t pass a criminal background test.

Why is this important to us? This means it will take longer to build new homes and the cost to build them is more expensive. Thus, we will have a shortage of housing for many many years to come in metro Denver. And prices will continue to SOAR.