By Emily Badger | The New York Times
“Garage doors are a nightmare,” said Rick Palacios Jr., the 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 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.
Few people had a problem getting them before. Now everyone seems to have that problem. Prices have doubled or tripled in the last 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, the president and C.E.O. 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.”
