How Well Did You Ride Out the Storm?

Heading into 2018, the word of the year could well be “resilience.”

Expect to hear government agencies and construction gurus cite it frequently as America rebuilds from this year’s devastating hurricanes and fires. To code officials, resilience means not just building homes that can better withstand Mother Nature’s fury; it also means creating places that are livable in the days after a disaster, even while the utility lines are out. Codes as stiff as those in Miami—which were credited with doing much to keep Hurricane Irma’s damage relatively minimal there—could become more common elsewhere. Organizations like the International Code Council are using recent natural disasters as motivation for changes in the next few years.

I believe resilience also should become a watchword for your business in 2018. Materials prices likely will gyrate through spring, victimized by production constraints and bigger-than-normal, disaster-driven demand. Your estimating systems likely will need constant updating to reflect the price changes. Expect the labor market to remain in flux as well: Today’s key sub might be tomorrow’s latest recruit to Florida or California.

But as we urge you to be aware of and react to changing conditions, don’t take them as signs of impending doom. To the contrary, the core economic conditions that support remodeling—employment, job growth, and wage increases—are looking great now, even better than in the housing boom a dozen years ago. One forecasting group believes the rebuilding work in Houston alone will boost national repair and remodeling spending by 4% in 2018. Nationally, the Residential Remodeling Index (published by Metrostudy, a sister company to Remodeling), forecasts consistently improving times for pro remodelers through 2020. In general, you should feel good about your prospects in the next 12 months.

Remodelers rank high among professions on the optimism scale. After all, you rarely can be sure about your business prospects more than eight weeks ahead, and yet you press on, confident that when one project nears completion, you’ll get a phone call requesting the next job. As such, I expect you’ll prove more able than others in construction to handle this coming era of resilience.