Greg Casper

Casper featured in ENR Cost Report

Oct 21, 2021

Engineering News-Record is one of the construction industry’s most authoritative publications. Each month they report on construction cost indexes and building cost indexes, and each quarter they research, analyze and publish a cost report. For the Q3 2021 Cost Report, ENR interviewed CRB’s Greg Casper, Director of Estimating.

Construction supply chain disruptions

The construction industry has seen numerous supply chain challenges this year, some related to the pandemic and some not.

“The amount of time it takes to get a shipment from China to the U.S. has more than doubled from 35 days to around 78 days. The ships are actually sitting at port for an average of eight days just waiting to be offloaded because there’s such a backlog of product trying to get to job sites in the U.S.”

Ways to mitigate the impact of construction cost inflation

Construction price indexes continuously rose from November 2020 to July 2021. There’s no single explanation or fix for the rapid cost escalation and supply chain slowdown the industry has experienced over the last year, but there are ways to mitigate the impacts of construction cost inflation.

“Since we have design and construction in-house, we’re really trying to get owners to make early design decisions for things that we know are long lead items; as an example, open-web joists right now, I’ve heard eight months, I’ve heard 12 months, depending on the supplier.”

An excerpt from the 2021 3Q Cost Report: No End in Sight to Year of Supply Chain Chaos and Materials Challenges can be found on ENR’s website. The full report is available for download with an ENR subscription.

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