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There isn't a lot of room for scaled improvements because labor speed is almost never the bottleneck in residential construction. It is the logistics of all the supplies, of all the subcontractors, the permitting, which all take considerable time and wait. And if people are building their own custom home, getting them to actually choose what windows, floors, doors, siding, roofing materials, or even just finalize the layout for framing can take a lot of time. The windows could all be installed in a few hours, but getting somebody to choose what windows they want could take days or longer, days for delivery, days for the contractors schedule to align while they are juggling a bunch of different jobs because rarely do they get to just sit on one jobsite for multiple days having everything they need ready to go. I think people overestimate the labor requirement/cost for building new construction because so much of their experience is dealing with repairs and maintenance and adapting old construction. While it might take a day or two to fix one already existent bathroom because of tearing old stuff out, not making a massive mess, fishing tools and materials through little access holes, you can plumb an entire new framed house with multiple bathrooms that doesn't have drywall in the way or people living in it in the same time or less. In the time it takes to fix your old existent leaking tub, in new construction a plumber could install 3 tubs, 5 toilets, 7 sinks, and hot water heater with all new pipe. And it will be a much easier task with far less struggle and both physical and mental anguish. Construction guys absolutely love new construction because it is literally 10x easier and without having to hack together old standards into new standards. Material costs are at minimum atleast 50% of the cost of new construction, some contractors will just automatically bid everything at double the base material cost and make decent money off that. And potentially even higher total cost will be just material if everything is decided beforehand and all the materials are ready to go on site, because half of your labor cost is paying for all these contractors and subcontractors to travel around to different sites at different times. If they can put in a solid 20-30 hours on a single project without leaving the job site, they are going to be happy and be making bank and able to put in low bids. If they gotta return to a single job site 20 separate times from repeatably going to stores, waiting for supply deliveries, waiting for decisions, they are going to want some compensation for it and it gets rolled into the labor cost. |