Construction Sees No End to High Materials Costs, Labor Availability

There’s been a “steady return of demand for projects across most sectors of commercial work,” says a new construction outlook report from JLL for the second half of 2021. But that success brings a problem of “above-average increases in construction costs.”

“Through August, average final construction costs for a commercial project had increased 4.5 percent, and total cost growth by year end is likely to surpass 6 percent,” the report reads. “A similar level of cost escalation, in the range of 4 to 7 percent, is expected into 2022,” though the materials component of the estimate is “the lowest confidence forecast due to the wide range of inputs and global supply chains bucketed into a single category.”