Construction, Pawn Shops Hurting From Housing Glut
By Brian Neill, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.
Feb. 11–A large section of the Ben Shives Truck Super Center lot on Ninth Street West in Bradenton used to be filled with commercial trucks for sale.
Now, owner Ben Shives says he’s more often the recipient of those large pickups and vans.
The reason?
Construction workers and companies no longer need them because many skilled labor jobs for bricklayers, roofers, and framers are scarce.
“It’s a complete turnaround from what it once was,” Shives said. “We were selling those vehicles before. I get calls every week from independent contractors and subcontractors that are reducing or eliminating their fleets and wanting to sell them. I had a guy call me yesterday wanting to sell five trucks.”
Pawn shop owners are seeing the same thing. Their shelves and storage rooms are lined with nail guns, heavy-duty saws and drills, tool bags and compressors from unemployed construction workers — another sign of the post-boom housing glut.
Inside Goldcoast Pawn shop on Manatee Avenue West, owner Bob Ranick handed a large, professional-grade impact wrench across the counter.
“Can you imagine holding that all day?” he said, offering the hefty tool for inspection.
Someone had held that tool all day. But no longer.
Ranick’s pawn shop has been inundated with such tools — so many in fact that he now has to refuse them.
“A lot of these guys aren’t working. I’ve been moving a lot of it to homeowners,” Ranick said. “We’ve pretty much quit taking them in. You can wholesale jewelry and you can wholesale firearms. But it’s very difficult to wholesale tools.”
Florida shed more than 20,000 construction jobs within the past year, according to the state’s Agency for Workforce Innovation.
The Manatee County office of the Suncoast Workforce Board has assisted close to 500 individuals in the last 90 days who are looking for employment after losing jobs in the construction industry, said Sally Hill, public relations manager for the agency.
“The industry is way down,” said Mary Dougherty-Slapp, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Manatee County. “The effect on the slowdown in the housing industry, as you mentioned with the pawn shops and car lots, has just permeated the entire economy.”
During a recent stop in Lakewood Ranch, Florida economist Henry Fishkind said it appeared that the local housing market was at or near a bottom, but would still take another year at least to show substantial signs of improvement.
Tightening lending standards brought about from the subprime mortgage debacle and a substantial number of vacant houses left behind by speculative investors is not likely to help the situation, experts say.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Florida was among seven states with the highest number of non-owner-occupied foreclosures, mostly linked to home-flipper defaults.
Homebuilders have struggled to move existing inventory and sales have sagged, leaving many in the construction industry out of work.
Their plight shows up in places like Sarasota Pawn and Jewelry, where owner Bobby Calcorzi also has seen more construction tools than he can handle.
“I have too many of what they’re bringing in,” Calcorzi said. “I’d say (it’s been) definitely about a 50 percent increase from a year ago — saws, drills, compressors, generators. Just normal stuff people in construction would use. I have too much in inventory right now. I had to get some extra storage for the stuff I do have.”
Dick Romine of Dick Romine’s auto sales on 14th Street West also has seen his used commercial vehicle inventory grow.
“I had one contractor who brought in seven units — pickups, vans — because he was cutting back and laying off a bunch of people,” Romine said. “Then, you see a lot of the smaller ones, they’re just giving it up. They just can’t make a living.”
Romine has taken in some of the vehicles, but most often has to move them on the wholesale market or out of state.
“If the construction people aren’t working,” Romine said, “they don’t need them.”
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