“The home-building industry is having the most difficult time in decades meeting demand, the sum of many pandemic complications. But this moment reaches peak absurdity with garage doors.” Writes Emily Badger at The New York Times…
- Time inflation. “It used to take us 20 weeks to build a house,” said Adrian Foley, the president and C.E.O. of the Brookfield Properties development group. “And now it takes us 20 weeks to get a set of garage doors.”
- No one is happy about this. “In most parts of the country, a builder can’t pass final inspection for a home that is otherwise perfectly complete — but that is missing its garage door. That means builders don’t get paid and home buyers can’t move in.”
- Don’t blame the door. It’s not the door that is the problem. “Rather, inspectors test the mechanism required by federal law to automatically halt the doors in case anything, or anyone, gets stuck underneath…The safety mechanism inside a garage door is one small part of a complex product — or, more important, a product with a complex supply chain.”
Time isn’t the only thing inflated with garage doors these days. Costs are up as well. The Times reports that a garage door used to cost around $3,200 and that cost is now running about $6,000. This is not good news for anyone who thought out housing inventory problem was going to be solved by new construction.