Housing affordability is on everyone’s minds today. And rightly so. The convergence of rising material costs, supply chain bottlenecks and surging interest rates are hammering builders and home buyers alike.
It’s times like these that require fresh thinking. For example, some builders have moved to build-to-rent as a way to keep framing crews busy and cash flow positive. The National Association of Home Builders reports there were 13,000 new single-family homes started as rentals the first quarter of this year, up 63% year-over-year. The overall number may be small, but the trend is clear.
Many builders are looking to team up with off-site building component manufacturers. The push to minimize costly field labor and minimize scheduling headaches with overbooked subcontractors has never been greater.
After all, where would the industry be without factory-built trusses, cabinets, windows, doors, flooring and pre-finished interior products like floors? It’s easy to take those materials for granted. Resourceful builders now look to extend that plug-and-play advantage to other building elements.
Speed with Quality & Savings
Take molding, for example. More and more builders are taking a critical eye to traditional paint-in-place molding. Doesn’t a pre-painted solution make sense? It does if it can speed up closing by three to six days and reduce builder’s financing costs accordingly.
One person who closely follows the quiet revolution going on in molding is Charla Lang. Lang is the national sales manager of strategic products for North America’s leading molding manufacturer, Metrie.
The 10-year industry veteran knows firsthand what builders are up against, especially with the varying abilities of molding installers and painting contractors. The industry’s continuing struggles to fill labor gaps with unseasoned or overworked workers often leads to subpar installations. Manufacturing innovation is a proven way to simultaneously improve installation cycle times and quality.
“Consistent quality is a big issue right now. With labor shortages and rapid turnover, expecting high, uniform quality from house to house is difficult. That leads to callbacks from home owners unhappy with blemished, marred molding, uneven painting and quality that falls short of expectation,” Lang explains.
Molding Delivers
Quality matters when it comes to molding. Just over 97% of real estate professionals affirm molding along with trim is extremely or significantly important to home appearance. So much so, nine out of 10 real estate pros recommend updated molding in prepping for a home sale.
Lang agrees one obvious solution is pre-painted molding product, which some manufacturers offer. However, that doesn’t go nearly far enough to meet today’s building challenges. “For the last 18 to 24 months everyone has been forced to innovate in order to meet time and quality expectations,” Lang says.
Cut the Right Corners
To help builders meet both expectations, Metrie offers a patented, pre-painted molding system called Metrie Complete that includes a color-matched kit of a wax fill stick, putty, caulk and spray enamel paint, an unmatched total solution that finally addresses quality and cycle time issues. Lang and her team are right there on the jobsite with the builder through the product conversion process working with the trades and builder to help create efficiencies in production schedule and set quality expectations.
“Most builders can save about a thousand dollars a home and cut a couple days off the delivery schedule,” Lang reports. “Builders immediately see the advantage. They see how pre-painted molding with color matched touch-up materials reduces callbacks and ensures uniform house to house quality with minimal labor.”
There is no perfect way out of today’s building challenges. Give credit to smart, innovating ways to build a home like Metrie Complete for helping builders cut the right corners.
Learn more about how builder innovations like Metrie Complete can shave time and dollars from your projects.