Ballarat's construction industry is feeling the pressure from repeated snap lockdowns more than ever after regional Victoria entered its seventh on Saturday.
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Under the lockdown rules, smaller construction sites such as houses can have a maximum of five workers plus a supervisor on-site at any one time.
Further limiting movement, supervisors and specialist contractors may only visit three different sites per week.
However, one of the biggest impacts of the pandemic has been the scarcity of materials, which has created long delays in starting new builds, but also completing existing ones.
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Stroud Homes Ballarat director Simon Walshe said difficulty obtaining materials such as timber had pushed out lead times by weeks, if not months.
"We've gone from two or three-week lead times at the start of the year to we're now probably at 20-week lead times. It's really just slowing down builds. Instead of a build potentially taking four or five months, that's blowing out by months so that's making things difficult as well," he said.
"We're starting them later. Normally, someone would sign a contract and we would be on site in a month's time. There's no point being on site for two or three months because we can't get the materials to build with anyway. We're delaying people's build starts and then that's affecting build times as well."
Mr Walshe said supply and demand for those materials had caused steep price increases which has cost some builders thousands as builds were costing more than the contracted price.
"I know of a couple of builders who are stuck building homes that they're going backwards on but there's no way for them to get out of the contracts. That's all just spiking prices so it's making it really hard," he said.
Mr Walsh said while his business had employed the state government QR codes for contact tracing and was managing its site capacities, it had affected flexibility.
"To have the flexibility to go 'Hey, I've finished this job and I want to go to the next one'. You could potentially go to the next one and there's another tradie there and that'll mean you're overcapacity and that means you just have to go home," he said.
"You hear stories of busloads of Melbourne people coming up to do work and there's six, eight, 10 people on site.
"You don't want to be running around dobbing on people, I suppose, but at the end of the day, it's frustrating when there's a fair portion of the building industry that's trying to do the right thing."
Metricon has more than 50 homes currently under construction in Ballarat, but the restrictions have also added significant amounts of time to its builds that it cannot get back.
Regional manager Simon Taylor said having to stop and start through lockdowns had been challenging not just for builders, but customers and suppliers.
"A high majority of our customers will be either renting or have existing mortgages, so if we're overlapping with time or extending construction times for the houses, that's generally going to have an impact for them the longer it goes on," he said.
"Ultimately, we can't just turn around and do everything at the click of our fingers because we still have quality measures and our customers, we're going to need to look after them with their quality homes as well.
"There's a certain build process and timeline that we need to follow and we just can't bring that forward and gain the time that we've lost."
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