Building costs in Barbados have escalated in the face of rising prices primarily for construction materials.
Between 2022 and 2024, the cost of building a standard home increased by 15 per cent to 18 per cent, fetching a price of $250 to $300 per square foot. This is according to information provided by BCQS International, a property development and construction consultancy company.
Two of the company’s consumption cost consultants, who wanted to remain unidentified, provided insight on the spike in building costs, relating them to an increase in the price of materials and fuel, and pressures on labour costs.
The material costs of steel, concrete, lumber, blocks and sand all increased within the last two years.
“Material cost is the biggest thing. There is pressure on labour costs and also availability, because at the moment, if you go and look for a carpenter or electrician, they’re all being absorbed by all these larger projects,” a consultant explained.
“After COVID-19, shipping costs affected everyone. A container from China might have been $6 000, then it went up to $20 000. It went down to $15 000, then it went to $7 000. It’s fluctuating all the time, so construction costs are going up.
“Fuel also affects everything. Shipping cost is affected by fuel, so you’ve got to ship it here, then you’ve got to transport it. We’re paying more for fuel so this just has a natural impact because everything we bring in comes shipped in,” he added.
While most of the prices increased in response to the COVID pandemic, some of the figures remained unchanged with little to no adjustment years after.
“The only way it would change now is a crash in the world economy. The only way you could do it is if suddenly there’s a recession in areas where large supplies are,” said one of the consultants.
“They’ll need to sell timber at a cheaper price globally because we import everything. If suddenly, there’s no demand in China, in India, in the United States and places like that, then people are just going to have to drop their prices and then we benefit off of that. But what’s happened post-COVID is that everybody ramped up their prices during COVID. Suddenly, there was an upsurge but those prices didn’t come back down,” explained a consultant.
Businessman and developer Mark Maloney also identified shipping as one of the major factors in the cost of building materials in the Caribbean.
“Shipping prices go up and come down but depend on what is going on around the world. When there’s war, shipping prices go up. It just depends on what goes on around the world and we don’t have control of that in the Caribbean. There’s a saying that we can’t control the wind, but we can direct the sail, so we can only focus on the things that we can control.
“Depending on the month, it may be lower than the month before, or it may be higher than the month after, just depends on what’s going on around the world and that also applies to the cost of the products and the materials,”
he said.
The cost of building a home is something which the developer said often varied on the structural design or location. Above all, the developer stressed the need for an efficient approach to construction that would lower the cost of building.
“Every home, every condominium, every commercial building, every piece of infrastructure, there’s only so much cost that we can put into it before it becomes uneconomical for a purchaser or for an investor.
“So we just have to bear that in mind in everything that we do. It’s not dissimilar to a vehicle, there’s only so much that someone can afford to pay for a vehicle when they have to pay a lease arrangement or pay a bank and
all that. So even when material prices are going up, they have to try to see how they can be as efficient as they can in manufacturing it,” he added.
The Weekend Nation reached out to Sand Depot, which deals in building materials and construction services. A representative who declined to be named, disclosed that the cost of sand increased now that most of it was imported.
“There was, obviously, no import costs at previous years so that was something new for us in these last three years. Imports have called for a larger price difference and we can’t import brown sand because not many islands have the type of sands they have, since they have a mixture of the clay and the sand,” the representative said.
Sand is a key ingredient in many construction materials, including concrete, mortar and asphalt. The mixture provides bulk to mortar and helps create a more durable concrete product.
In 2020, Barbados faced mounting concerns regarding the level of sand supply in the face of major activity in the construction industry. In response, Government introduced measures to permit businesses to secure the product through foreign exports.
In the face of these imports, the price of sand increased to $2 000 per 12-metre load, a change from the $900 to $1 000 per 12-metre market price of two years ago, according to information provided by BCQS International.
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