Construction Costs After the Tariff Cycle
What's sticky, what's reverting, and what to underwrite.
Hard costs spiked, partly retraced, and settled into a new normal that is neither the old baseline nor the peak. Underwriting either extreme gets you a wrong number.
Labor Is the Sticky Part
Material prices are volatile but mean-reverting. Skilled labor is the structural constraint — an aging trades workforce that no amount of demand conjures overnight. Schedule risk now lives in the labor line.
The developers pricing this correctly are padding contingency on time, not just dollars, because a stalled schedule is where margin actually disappears.
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