Brad Glass, executive vice president of The McCall Group of Companies, said there is no doubt contractors are feeling the impact of COVID-19.
“I suspect every contractor in America would say the same if being honest,” he said.
Glass said owners and developers are skittish and most remember the Great Recession impact of 2008 and the years after.
“This virus has the same type feel and is eerily familiar,” Glass said.
He said some owners have put projects on hold or delayed the start “to see where this pandemic goes.”
“Just today we got an email on a very nice hotel project we have been working on for over a year,” Glass said April 1.
“The message was ‘we are putting this project on hold.’ Their reasoning was who wants to build a hotel in this current situation,” he said.
“It’s tough on contractors because you go from full throttle to in some cases full stop and all of a sudden have our great men and women with no projects to report to the next day.”
Glass said with some health care construction projects, “we have been asked to stop all work and leave the premises until the pandemic is contained. This makes sense to us and we obviously respond immediately.”
He experienced a similar scenario with a major retail customer for which McCall handles store renovations.
“Simply explained, they are all hands on deck for sanitizing and restocking shelves and do not want renovation efforts to hinder their efforts,” Glass said.
There is a silver lining, he said.
“In some instances we have seen where savvy owners are using these slow times to let us get in there and perform renovations,” he said.
He said Perry-McCall Construction Inc. a McCall company, has a healthy backlog to keep it busy for years.
“Some of our development partners are now aggressively looking for good buys which inevitably will lead to construction opportunities for us,” he said.
He said the company is fine for now and remains busy.
“We are a faith-based company and we also support and believe in this federal, state and local administrations,” he said.
Glass said the company continues to hire.
“We firmly believe that once this ends in the near future it will be like when WWII ended and the nation will be invigorated and we will be busier than ever.”