Quote Originally Posted by HURRICANEBOB View Post
While it might sound good for the economy, I guess now is a bad time to start thinking about having a house built. Materials up, cost competition/price competition pushing prices down, sounds to me like owner risk in having a quality house built would be up. I'm being serious and not clowning like usual. Am I putting the pieces together wrong? Sounds like the builder gets pinched by lower housing market value, higher cost for material, and that to the consumer, that would make it that much harder to sort though builders to find the good ones.
I'm building a house right now and got very luck to start when I did in April. Shingles that I bought at $60 sq are now over $100 at Lowe's. Materials were/are a lot lower with the down market. Also, you have contractors/sub-contractors fighting for business and are bidding less and less. The only issue I am having is the dang drywall crew has done a crappy job and they are coming back to fix a lot of stuff before they get paid. My uncle is the supervising contractor and he's just making a small % over costs. He arranged everything and is supervising it.

If you are not in a hurry, I'd wait til next March. Winter prices are typically lower and with all unemployment benefits stopping in January, I expect there will be another big dip in the economy.