SUPPLIES & DEMAND.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Construction Industry - Brief Article

With plenty of work to go around, some builders are having problems meeting their material needs.

From the climate-controlled comfort or his Jeep Grand Cherokee, Mike Chandler watches his work crew struggle to get a Dumpstersized refrigeration unit from the ground to a steel-frame "penthouse" 30 feet in the air. One day, it will cool butter, eggs and other perishables awaiting shipment to an Aldi supermarket, part of a German chain with 12 stores in 10 North Carolina cities.

Today, all it's cooling is the pace of work at the site of Aldi's Carolinas division office and distribution center in East Spencer. It hangs from a crane a few feet off the ground while workers make adjustments to its base. It has to be placed now, while the steel skeleton is going up, because it's too heavy and bulky to maneuver after the building is enclosed. "This is the time-consuming part of the job because you have to stop and get your equipment in place before you can proceed with your steel," says Chandler, senior project manager for New York-based Bovis Lend Lease Inc., the second-largest contractor based or with an office in North Carolina.

It's an unavoidable delay, in good times or bad. But times have been good for Tar Heel contractors in recent years -- most of this year's top 30 have boosted revenues from two years ago -- and that's brought a new set of time pressures. Take Chandler's steel. He ordered it in late September, about 10 weeks before it was needed, and wound up getting it 14 weeks later. The steel slowdown is even worse on another project he's doing, a three-building distribution center in Concord for Houston-based Sysco Corp. Sysco is paying 3% extra to rush steel to the most time-sensitive part of the project. The other two buildings will be delayed about six weeks while crews wait for steel. "It's not so much the money as it is the time," Chandler says. "Everybody wants these jobs with a pretty quick time turnaround, and these materials delays are what are killing us on our progress schedules."

That lament can be heard on hundreds of construction sites across the state. With the estimated cost of permitted building projects growing an average of 16% annually from 1991 to 1998 and suppliers struggling to keep up with demand, there's always something threatening to demolish some schedule. If it's not lack of steel, it's a dearth of labor, brick, insulation, cement or drywall.

Statewide, the unemployment rate hovered around 3% most of 1999...