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Last month, Utah Business partnered with Dentons Durham Jones Pinegar to host a roundtable on the state of building, construction and design in Utah. Moderated by Joey Gilbert, president and CEO of Associated General Contractors of Utah, they discussed workforce demands, mental health, innovations and more.
We’ve heard it’s a great time to be in construction. Is that true?
Aaron Metcalfe | VP, Marketing & Business Development | Hogan & Associates Construction
For the people in the field, it’s a great time because their salaries are going up due to market forces. A good superintendent is worth their weight in gold. How it translates for the ownership and things like that is debatable. Owners get a quality building if they have a good superintendent and good crews, but higher costs are going to slow down the market.
Mark Oakeson | Commercial Division Manager | Wadsworth Brothers Construction
We’re seeing a split between publicly and privately funded projects. It’s a good time to be a firm pursuing diverse projects because the privately funded stuff is struggling to get started. The cost impacts are felt harder by private owners. However, good publicly funded projects are coming down into states with a lot of growth, like Utah.
Jeff Palmer | EVP | Layton Construction
An old friend from the tech industry called recently asking if I was hiring. I’ve lost many employees over the years to tech companies, so it’s fun to hire someone from tech. I’ve had three phone calls like that. When the tech industry is reaching out to the construction industry, it’s a good time to be in construction.
Keith Hansen | Architect & Partner | AE Urbia
We’re just as busy as we’ve been the past 10 years, and there are a lot of projects coming online. The design side of things has not slowed down. There are build-to-suit office buildings, multi-family projects and even a one million-square-foot warehouse out in the northwest quadrant coming on board. They may not build right away, but they’re ready to pull the trigger as soon as it makes sense for them.
Chris Kobayashi | Principal Electrical Engineer | Spectrum Engineers
We’re seeing an extension of design timeframes in general. It’s not just, “Go and do the design.” We’re doing all the pre-construction, responding to costing and going through iteration after iteration. Projects that might’ve been a six- or nine-month design are now a nine- or 12-month design.
Carl Tippets | President | Pentalon Construction
Construction costs are 30 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic. Interest rates are very, very high right now. Loan-to-value ratios have all become pretty punitive. The small people who wanted to do projects are really being pushed out. The real reason larger developers push forward is that they’ve built a lot of overhead and have to justify that by finding projects.
What’s keeping you up at night?
Troy Gregory | President & CEO | Hunt Electric, Inc.
The challenges moving forward are the mega projects coming down the pipeline: Texas Instruments, massive data centers, etc. Those projects have money built into them, and it’s going to be an issue. We don’t want to tie all of our resources up in those projects and not be available for others.
Harvey Hansen | President | KOH Mechanical Contractors
Manpower is going to be the biggest issue with these projects all coming up. We’re reaching out to high school students before they’re even in the trade, telling them that there are other things besides college. We’re reaching out to counselors to show them that trade schools allow for good living.
Heather Soderquist | VP, Construction Innovation | Jacobsen Construction
What we’re dealing with is the balance between our young people and our experienced people. We have a lot of young people out there who are eager and ready to go with no experience. We are constantly trying to balance keeping up with construction, educating young people and putting practices in place fast enough.
Kelly Chatterton | VP | Utah Ready Mix (representing Kilgore Companies)
Our challenge is to stay competitive from a wage standpoint while facing pressure to keep projects. We help train the younger workforce and show them that this is a good career path, but the cost to train now under the new standards is challenging.
Braden Moore | VP | Big-D Construction
We are making sure we’re spending time on the right projects, providing great customer service and mitigating risk along the way for ourselves and our owners. If you’re not mitigating risk in pre-construction, you’re going to have huge issues in construction.
What are you doing to attract younger generations into construction and bring women into the industry?
Aaron Hall | Director, Operations | Okland Construction
This isn’t something the industry is going to solve for us. We have three main focuses: recruit, train and retain. We have a committee focused on presentations and visits to high schools, summer short-term internships and paid scholarships for the next generation of our craft. We’re also focused on compensation, benefits and giving young professionals training and a career path.
Troy Gregory | President & CEO | Hunt Electric, Inc.
We’ve had a lot of success getting students from high schools. We’ve narrowed in and put it into certain channels to help them get going quicker and develop further with the necessary skill sets. We’re trying to give them the skills to help them be successful right out of the gate.
Celestia Carson | Principal | VCBO Architecture
The licensing body for architects is taking a very hard look at the barriers preventing people with talent and passion from becoming licensed architects, including opening alternative paths to licensure. This will start bringing in people who have the ability to be licensed architects but not the funds. Also, it’s hard for anyone to be what they don’t see. As we’ve brought more women into partnership, it’s amazing how many more women apply to become employees at our office.
Jodi Geroux | Director, Hospitality Studio | FFKR Architects
At FFKR, we’ve implemented maternity and paternity leave benefits to bring in and retain women and men. We are a very family-oriented company and understand that we all have families and friends outside of work—we really strive to hit a work/life balance. We encourage people to take time off when they have time off and spend it with their families.
Allen Clemons | Design, Real Estate Development & Construction Industry Consultant | Sequel Development
We created an Industry Advisory Committee Scholarship at BYU that funds 20+ scholarships every year for students in construction management. Almost 50 percent of the scholarships in the last few years have been either minority-received or women-received.
Andrew Gettig | General Manager & Senior Commercial Account Manager | Sports West Construction
Some of the young workers we hire think they’re going to be running the company in two years. They’re not interested in a 10-year career path. Corporate offices are trying to make their campuses more attractive with yoga studios, in-house theaters and rooftop pickleball. If we want to be truly innovative, we have to adapt at a leadership level. We need an actual plan that will help our people be as effective as they can.
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This article was originally published by a www.utahbusiness.com . Read the Original article here.
