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What happened to the materials for the construction of houses. I thought it was a local thing because few of them were brought to my location, but no - it happens everywhere!

Building materials rely utterly on logistics, and shipping prices have gone mental. I’m on a couple of Kickstarter’s that are delayed and reporting shipping costs for containers in particular increasing like 600%

I think the demand is also up. A lot of people started home improvement projects while at home during Covid.

The housing market is also skewed. It’s a seller’s market where there are far more people wanting to buy a house then want to sell, jacking up prices. Not sure if there would be splash from that in new construction, but it makes sense to me.

More supply, less demand. Invisible hand does its thing.

 Flinty wrote:
Building materials rely utterly on logistics, and shipping prices have gone mental. I’m on a couple of Kickstarter’s that are delayed and reporting shipping costs for containers in particular increasing like 600%

That's pretty much it. Many building supplies come from overseas, whether that's bricks, timber, plasterboard etc. Even when those are produced locally a lot of the raw materials will likely be sourced from overseas.

We're about to start a garage conversion and the contractor has stated their prices for raw materials have risen about 18% since the start of the year. Thankfully they've honoured our original quote, but that increase is pretty much entirely down to scarcity. It doesn't help that in the UK we're building new homes at a ridiculous rate so the big construction firms are snapping up a lot of the materials as soon as they're available.

Combination of reduced production capacity, shipping/logistics delays, and increased demand. As far as the US is concerned labor issues have also driven up costs here as well - received revised construction quotes for a project I'm managing at work that we had to shelve at the start of COVID - the price increased about 30% over the past 18 months.

Another point I think is that in the UK at least, construction was one of the first industries to get back to work, as its largely low employee density outdoor type work. Compared to manufacturing where it took a bit longer I think to get back up to any kind of capacity will lead to a supply/demand issue for the materials needed for construction.

Supply chains everywhere are screwed up due to COVID, shipping container shortages, freight prices, etc, etc, etc.

Paper and book publishing is also heavily impacted.

Yeah, we're having our front and back gardens landscaped, and the cost has jumped up a fair bit from the initial quote earlier in the year. Painful.

I work in the Glass Industry, Windows, showers, mirrors etc. The prices went up 40% during Covid last year, with an additional 9% starting THIS month.

We have to practically work for free just to get the jobs after material cost, since customers don't care about feeding you.

Lead times on these materials used to be 3 weeks tops. Now it's 8 to 10.

Timber was one of the first things to get widespread price hikes when the first Lockdowns eased up.
DIY was the main blame, back then, while the supply chain was still hit.
Building work picking back up just made that worse.