Give or take, frontline team members and their homebuilding company partners are on pace to

Image courtesy of NAHB Eye On Housing

Anyone who doubts the field – which as of the latest JOLTS data release, counts 371,000 open construction headcount positions — will be able to attract and retain the talent-power to amp up production to an even greater volume level once economic conditions and mortgage rates resume equilibrium should see what’s going on at sites like this.

You should witness the work of one of the fellows we met this week, as he sat in a construction site trailer, with a Bluetooth headset and mic and three big monitors, each its own dashboard of color-coded, flashing and flickering data-sets in motion as the job – going on in real time outside the windows of the vehicle – progressed like a literal hive of constant, fully-orchestrated human and machine activity.

This fellow was – just a little over a year ago – working in a warehouse, lifting dead-weight bags of Portland cement at barely over minimum wage.

Today, he’s “driving” a home from slab-to-completion in record-setting times that are only the beginning of the beginning of a transformation in residential construction – not just of its outputs but in its human capital and capability.

Today, he’s living proof of two things. One, is that anyone who claims that “work is a dirty word” as a categorical insight, needs to get out more. Two is that anybody who may despair of the future of building and construction’s shallowed-out talent pool won’t have too much longer to wait for manifest signs of a tipping point to the positive.

It’s going on now. Hidden in plain sight.

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