No garage door? Unlikely woes are holding up homebuilding
A single house under construction in America today faces all kinds of problems, starting with a run on lumber, then bricklayers in demand, subcontractors with COVID, appliances on back order and plumbing fixtures out at sea.
Get through all of that, and then comes one more hitch with what should be a straightforward finishing touch.
“Garage doors are a nightmare,” said Rick Palacios Jr., director of research at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. If you had to rank the headaches homebuilders face, he said, “garage doors are the worst right now.”
The homebuilding 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.
Few people had a problem getting them before. Now everyone seems to have that problem. Prices have doubled or tripled in the past year. Lead times have stretched from weeks to months. Homebuilders who would once order garage doors several weeks before finishing a house are now ordering them before the foundation is poured.
“It used to take us 20 weeks to build a house,” said Adrian Foley, president and CEO of the Brookfield Properties development group, which develops thousands of single-family homes annually in North America. “And now it takes us 20 weeks to get a set of garage doors.”
Many frustrations that builders face today aren’t entirely novel. Tariffs and natural disasters have rattled supply chains before. Skilled labor has been an issue for years. Zoning rules have long stymied construction. Rather, what is unique, with an American twist, is a problem like this: Homebuilders are struggling to complete new homes amid a housing shortage because they must first complete the thing designed to house our cars.
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 homebuyers can’t move in.
Delays are also contributing to the slow pace of homebuilding. Before the pandemic, a typical single-family home might have taken seven months to construct. Today it can take up to a year.
Nine in 10 new single-family homes in America were built with a garage in 2020, and they are nearly universal in the Midwest and on the West Coast. So just about every new house needs a garage door.
“If anything, the pandemic has even furthered that” demand, said Jeff Schroeder, a senior vice president for Ponderosa Homes in California. As home prices have soared during the pandemic, families in places like the Bay Area are pushed toward cheaper housing farther into the exurbs. “To do that,” Schroeder said, “they need a car.”
Schroeder’s company has been putting cheap, plain garage doors on homes selling in the $600,000s. “They’re just placeholders,” he said, awaiting permanent replacements.
Foley’s company has delayed closings rather than come up with temporary fixes.
“The garage door is aesthetically a part of the home’s finish,” he said. To deliver a home without one — “it’s akin to delivering a new car without a front grille.”
In Sacramento, national homebuilder Lennar asked the city’s building department for a reprieve from garage door requirements.
“This is probably the first time I’ve ever been involved with a supply chain issue,” said Winfred DeLeon, Sacramento’s chief building official. The department came up with a provisional agreement — to be signed by the bank and the homebuyer — allowing a home to be occupied with painted plywood sealing the garage.
The issue for the final inspection isn’t the door itself. Rather, inspectors test the mechanism required by federal law to automatically halt the doors in case anything, or anyone, gets stuck underneath.
No one has used the agreement yet, DeLeon said. But it’s ready for the next home, or the next home component shortage.
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. According to an index created by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, garage doors have a more complex supply chain than windows, HVAC systems and plumbing fixtures. They present more possibilities for something to go awry than just about everything other than appliances and lighting fixtures.
Take apart one of these doors and it has a couple of hundred individual subcomponents: panels, tracks, brackets, hinges, springs. The models come in all kinds, too: garage doors to make your home look like a fortress, a barn, a carriage house.
Garage doors come measured not in one- or two-car sizes, but in threeor six-inch increments. Want windows? How about insulation? The answers affect just how much it weighs. And now you need a different spring to counterbalance it.
Amid all this variety, a few problems have been acute lately. Many doors contain spray-foam insulation, which has been in short supply since the plants in Texas that manufacture its chemical components were disrupted in last year’s winter freeze.
Many other garage door components are made from steel, which has also been in short supply. And even companies that manufacture the finished doors domestically typically source parts from China that have been snarled in global shipping.