[quasi]

Originally Posted by originalhypa

My buddy is a higher up at one of the large developers and he tells me that the issue is with a lack of skilled sub contractors. You have hundreds of people working on these mdu buildings and you have a 1 in 4 chance of getting a major defiency. You may have a great plumber working on your unit, but chances are that you will have shoddy tile work. Or you may get a finisher that really cares, but your electrician is an alcoholic. He even says that for what people are paying that the place should be perfect, and he does his best to ensure that the units are of the highest quality. But there are things they can't control, or figure out too late and that's where you have problems.

He admits that he wouldn't pay the price that these units are going for. The quality just isn't there, and chances are we're up for another "leaky condo" tragedy like we did during the last big building boom. That could be what hurts the market more than anything.

A lot of the issues the general contractors are getting from subcontractors are caused by the schedules there putting out now a days. The shift we've seen is somewhat alarming, they are taking projects that you used to get a year to do and demanding they be done in 6 months. When you're working at that pace it leads to nothing but headaches and problems. They might have a nice schedule when the project comes into conception but it gets behind for this that or the other and the end date never changes.

Case and point, we're doing a high end mid rise in West Vancouver right now, it was originally a 12 month schedule for our scope we were 5 months late getting started due to no fault of our own but we're still expected to turn everything over in December. The exact same thing happened on the last two towers we did in Richmond. Instead of running 60 guys on a job in a controlled fashion you now have 110, many of which are useless but you have no choice because if you don't provide bodies you get put on notice and they bring in other companies and back charge the shit out of you. It's lose lose for everyone involved.