The pandemic has created a renewed demand for outdoor living projects--with people spending more time at home, and seeking to make their at-home experience a little more pleasant. As consumers have scaled back spending on travel, dining, and entertainment, they have directed some of those additional resources to outdoor living projects.
With lumber prices soaring in the past several months, home builders are scrambling for ways to keep the cost of construction in check, fueling a renewed interest in alternative materials. While they may still not be cheaper than lumber, the spike in lumber prices is causing many builders to rethink the cost/benefit tradeoffs of traditional alternatives to lumber — steel, concrete, and plastics.
During NAHB’s Building Systems Week in late September, I presented “Builder Attitudes Towards Systems-Built Construction,” which summarized the findings of three different recent studies related to builder views and usage of offsite construction methods and factory-built components. Overall, the market is bullish toward use of offsite methods, and some sectors—such as multifamily—have been much quicker to adopt these into housing production.
With COVID-19 dramatically changing attitudes on how people view housing, there is a strong renewed interest in healthy indoor environmental quality. This is not only due to a desire to keep homes “virus free,” but also because people are spending more time in their homes, so a comfortable and healthy home environment is playing a bigger role in their lives. Findings from our latest Builder Practices Survey, which we fielded among home builders in early 2020, serve as a benchmark for industry practices at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Moving forward, we expect that building practices regarding indoor health and comfort will continue to follow the major change in consumer attitudes about this topic.
Ahead of tabulating and announcing the 2020 Consumer Practices Survey (CPS) findings, Home Innovation is releasing some analysis of remodeling activities from our 2019 survey as a baseline for the new data.
A decade ago, most predicted that rising energy costs and more stringent energy efficiency regulations would spell the doom of all-electric heating systems while sparking the market for natural gas and geothermal heating systems. Things haven’t gone as predicted. Why? First, modest energy prices have prevailed, and heating loads for homes has declined dramatically due to improved efficiency of the building envelope. Second, single-family homes are actually getting smaller and they’re more likely to be one-level than two or more. Third, there’s been a surge in “exurb” development, neighborhoods being built outlying large metropolitan areas, away from the city and often without access to piped gas.