Hanley Wood’s Builder 100 survey asked hundreds of builders “What is your biggest challenge to growing and building your business in 2015?”
We’re all familiar with the biggest challenges the market is facing right now–the availability of lots and qualified labor, rising material costs, and stringent mortgage qualification standards that are boxing out potential new home buyers.
But in the Builder 100 survey, we asked builders to identify the biggest impediments to their personal success in 2015, which provided insight into how pervasive some of these hot-button issues are, and how many builders are impeded by these bottlenecks at the same time.
In order to quantify the qualitative answers from each builder and search for any trends, we looked to the words. We compiled all the responses and set a minimum of five occurrences per word, leaving us with 31 words that appeared five times or more in all of the answers.
Top Five Occurring Words: (note that we combined words where no meaning would be lost)
- land/lot/lots: 93 occurrences
- labor/workforce: 36 occurrences
- available/availability: 35 occurrences
- cost/costs: 24 occurrences
- finding/supply: 23 occurrences
Continue reading the analysis with an interactive map at builderonline.com.
Last month, we discussed how Land Pressure: Combating Zombie Subdivisions is impacting homebuilders and how we can help. Clark Ellis at Big Builder has also discussed the impact of land competition in Homebuilder Moneyball. And labor just scratches the surface of the Pain Points in the Homebuilder Supply Chain found by Big Builder.
Join us at PCBC 2015 and we’ll show you how our solutions can help you reduce these costs before your competitors do.