Construction worker poaching adds to Triangle's rising home prices
A shortage of construction workers is adding to rising prices in the Triangle's real estate market.
Raleigh ranks second nationally on online real estate database Zillow's list of hottest markets for 2018, which considers factors such as income and population growth. Zillow said home prices rose about 5 percent on average in Wake County last year and will likely rise another 5 percent in the coming year.
Juan Perez, who owns Carolina Paint and Drywall, said increased labor costs are part of that increase.
"Our payroll, it went up 35 percent in the last two years," Perez said.
Workers who used to make $12 an hour hanging drywall and painting are now pulling in close to $18 an hour, and many are making well over $20.
"Different contractors, they steal your people," Perez said. "They pay more money, so those guys, what they are looking for is just (to) make more money, so they just go with whoever will pay more."
Friends of friends will call his employees and offer to pay $2 more an hour, he said, and he's even had contractors come to a job site and offer to hire his workers for more money on the spot.
"We have to pay more money. That's the only way we can keep the people working with us," he said.
He passes those costs on to home builders, such as Bost Construction, who then tack that increase onto the final sales price of a new home.
"It definitely increases our costs. We have to pay a little bit more to get the best guys," Bost Construction owner Rex Bost said.
Perez said he used to go to his native Mexico to find people who wanted to do grueling construction work, but he said that is no longer an option with the Trump Administration's policies on immigration.
"I think it's the situation, you know the president," he said. "There's a lot of scared (people). It's hard for us to bring 10 guys from Mexico."
Others in the industry are looking to the younger generation to help fill the gap.
"The long term is we definitely need to get more kids interested in skilled labor, and there are some good efforts going on in that direction, but we need more," Bost said.
