Originally Posted by
Sunseeker
As opposed to...uh. where exactly?
I built homes for nearly a decade. Um, where do you think contractors buy their materials? Direct from the forest? Nails forged in dwarven furnaces?
As someone now in real estate and dealing with new construction and having previously built homes, what I'll tell you is that there is a wide variety of "new construction". Track-home-esque builders and developers who put up shoddy multi-hundred-thousand-dollar homes are not new to construction. Builders who cheap out on their labor and produce poor homes are not new to construction. They were the bane of small-contractors everywhere 20 years ago and they remain a problem.
The problem is that the costs of construction have skyrocketed, which has shifted construction further into the hands of larger companies with larger cash flows, and margins are shrinking, new builds may bring in numerically large sums of money, but these make up a much smaller percentage relative to the final cost of the home. A $400k home costs $300k to build. 20 years ago a 200k home cost 100k to build. It was much easier for the individual contractor to build a home, pay their labor better, and make a larger profit margin. (Yes, these are the same end number, that's my point. It costs more to walk away with the same amount.)
Beyond that, consumers are far more likely to complain about new products, as opposed to used ones. Even an unprepared used-home buyer(yes, they are used homes) has at least a basic understanding that someone has lived here before, that this home has been here for some time already, and that there may be unknown issues stemming from that. I mean, it's literally a real estate agents job to remind them of that. People expect more from new construction and are more likely to complain.
And this doesn't even get into how materials have worsened over the last decade or so. OSB has gotten cheaper, more glue, less wood. The raw wood has gotten weaker, more prone to shrinking and bending. Hell drywall has gotten weaker.
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We had better materials, we got paid better, and we were able to build more towards the clients needs, rather than generic pre-rendered designs. Consumers are more demanding, less accepting of higher costs and their agents aren't helping, often undermining builders in favor of their clients, for obvious reasons.