Keeping up: Residential and

Keeping up:

Residential and industrial construction demand continues to rise, creating its own challenges

The Tampa Bay region is among the fastest-growing in the United States. Prior to 2020, the population was expanding, and companies were relocating. These trends have only accelerated with the COVID-19 pandemic as more people seek out less dense living environments, more value for their money and lower taxes. Tampa Bay fits all these criteria, and the result is a residential construction boom in line with the hot housing market.

On the industrial front, the demand for e-commercerelated warehousing has outweighed concerns in the office segment that saw the biggest impact from the pandemic but which still remains an area with a great deal of optimism for the post-pandemic era.

The building demand in the Tampa Bay region, however, is such that the sector is struggling to keep up, and that’s a problem. The pandemic has made life more difficult for developers and contractors with supply chain disruptions and a shortage of labor that is hampering the industry, alongside higher material costs, such as lumber. “Regarding challenges, currently, it’s hard to find people and in addition to that, there are supply chain disruptions. We had to stock up on material like all the lumber for a building for the next eight months, spend all that money upfront and have it sit at the project site. These challenges increase the costs and time of construction. As we overcome that, I’m really confident for the coming months,” said Eric Collin, owner and president of Firmo Construction, in an interview with Invest:.

Landscape The COVID-19 pandemic has been the great disruption of 2020/2021 against which progress in any sector must be measured. For the construction sector, the pandemic served to accelerate trends that bode well for future success. The desire to be in an area that is open for business, a business-friendly tax environment, good weather, and far more space commensurate with the working-from-home model have sent both people and companies to the region in droves.

No doubt, people were already arriving before the pandemic — there was a net population gain of 151,000 residents just in Hillsborough County from 2010 to 2018 — but COVID-19 served as a further boost. Population growth was at 1.7% in 2020 and is expected to grow 3.3% annually over the next three years, with more than 126,000 new residents forecasted to move to the ( )