My brother in LA is a contractor guy for high end work in high end houses. He’s beyond slammed. One of my neighbors here in SoFL owns a hardscape company. They do backyard decks, waterfalls, built-in BBQs, fancy paving stone driveways, etc. She can’t hire workers fast enough to keep up with the work she can sell.
I very much doubt this is what’s going on. There’s a number of explanations that plausibly explain this without resorting to an entire cabal of contractors who are playing elaborate mind games with you.
First or all, they said they were busy when you called but you don’t know how busy they were when you didn’t call. Something prompted you to call at the times you called and they could have prompted a whole bunch of other people to be calling around the same time. Talk to any GC and they’ll tell you that things often come in unpredictable waves. One month, everyone seemingly wants to get their kitchen remodelled and then nothing for a few months and then everyone wants a deck rebuilt. It could be a small patch of nice weather, you seeing construction going on in your neighbourhood, some popular show on tv, the point is, the many people who call during the popular times are going to hear that they’re busy but the few people who call during the unpopular times aren’t.
Secondly, contracting is a pretty bimodal business because it’s heavily driven by word of mouth. If you do good work on budget and are reliable, eventually you build up a rolodex of people who refer enough business your way that you’re constantly slammed. If you’re not up to that level, then you’re constantly scraping by and taking any job you can and winning bids by undercutting and then doing unscrupulous things to try and make back the budget, hence why contractors around the world tend to have such a poor reputation.
This leads to good contractors talking to overwhelmingly more potential clients than bad contractors as they can afford to be more picky and only take on projects that are a good fit for them.
Thirdly, the supply of contractors drops a lot faster in bad times than you might imagine. The abovementioned bad contractors can have only a few weeks of financial cushion which means that they can be wiped out by a bad market blip. This leaves only the few contractors that have managed to save up a financial cushion and they might end up doing more work individually even if there’s less work overall.
Last fall my wife and I looked for contractors for 2 projects, a new shower stall in the master bath and someone to level our concrete patio in the backyard. We got 3 estimates on the shower stall, all were asking full price and were 3 to 4 months out to do the work. That job was finally done a few weeks ago. For the patio, we called two places that advertise on TV. One said they could come out in May and give an estimate for work that would be done in October. The other company took our number and said they might call in about a year. The guy said he as 10 crews and is booked solid for the next 14 months. We finally got someone to come out last month. He turned down the job because of 2 cracks in the patio, he said we should just replace it. He said he cant fix the cracks on something that size. I am now considering tearing out the concrete and putting a composite patio that would match the composite deck we had installed 2 years ago.
Our experience has often been that we’ve had trouble even getting people out to give us quotes. Not sure if our jobs are too small, or just not what they are looking for, but it can be frustrating to try to be responsible and get 3 quotes, and then end up going w/ the only guy who calls you back.
Larger projects are bad enough, but try to get someone to come look at a very small project (like handyman sized). Forget construction companies, who won’t even talk to you about something small in scale. Problem is, this is a small house. So almost anything we want done falls under the small project category.
Luckily, we have “guys”. We have a carpet guy and a painter guy, and a plumber guy and an odd-jobs guy. I used to have a deck guy, but he retired. We guard these people zealously, treat them very well, don’t haggle over price, and give them good reviews. The odd-job guy doesn’t even like coming to our neighborhood because it’s w-a-a-a-a-y across town for him. I had to name drop to get him to come take a look, showed an interest in his son going to college, shot the shit with guy talk stuff, and generally buttered him up. He’s now done two small jobs for us that I would not have been able to accomplish without a whole lot of trouble. These people are like gold around here.
Contractors, on the other hand, when and if I can get them to show up, often give a bid for the work that is outrageously high. That’s because they really don’t want the job because the margins for an honest price would be too low. This is why my kitchen still has the same old crappy countertops.
Part of the answer to the OP question may be that during downturns people are looking to repair and renovate rather than sell and move. If you are thinking it’s a good time to do it, so are a lot of other people.