The price increase of construction materialscoupled with a slow economic recovery have hit the housing developers in the first months of 2022, after a 2021 that managed to reverse the impact of the start of the pandemic.
According to Jorge Solano Vega, Corporate Commercial Director of the housing company Sadasi, the high prices of supplies have put considerable pressure on the housing developers; however, it has sought to act with all caution so as not to blur supply with demand.
“This 2022 we started very slowly, with a demonic of ghosts behind: increases in the price of steelthe concretethe cementthe supplieson the White lineon the electronicsIn all, impressive increases that have been forcing us to increase our prices very tactfully, because if we leave the market, we are going to lose the customer,” Solano Vega commented.
In his participation in the XXXII National Housing Meeting, organized by the National Chamber for the Development and Promotion of the Housing Industry (Canadevi), the director of Sadasi recalled that 2020 was a year that showed a good start in the housing industry; however, after the arrival of the pandemic in Mexico, the goals were reduced more than they were actually affected.
The manager commented that by 2021, the housing sector managed to correct the situation; however, the trend has not been replicated this year due to increases in input prices, general inflation and the armed conflict in Ukraine.
Although, said the businessman, the industry is dispersed in the type of actors that intervene, it is necessary to create schemes that allow saving and reducing costs to benefit all service segments, since migrating all to the sectors of higher value, like the residential ones, the client portfolio is going to be reduced.
“Today, the numbers of our results are a little below what we all expected and we need to overcome them if we want to have a final year-end closing,” said the businessman.
“The affordable housing materially it has disappeared, we have moved from the market, we are going to higher income levels and the more we climb that pyramid, the fewer and fewer customers there will be”.
Information exchange support
In his speech, Solano Vega stated that the members of the housing industry They must collaborate both in the exchange of information and in the development of strategies to address the crisis in the sector, both in the production and in the sale of houses.
The representative of the developer questioned that housing organizations and banks have detailed information on their potential clients, but do not use that data in analyzing strategies and disseminating information.
“Banks have an impressive amount of information on their customers, and we have not been able to get them to reverse this process, to analyze the data of these customers and to be able to accurately measure the intention and interest in purchasing,” questioned the representative of Sadasi.
“On the other hand, that information is not being sent to those clients.”
He exemplified the case of a public institute that offers to add the resources of the Housing Subaccount to a bank loan, whose placement goal this year is 25,000 loans; however, less than 100 financings of this type have been formalized to date.
“They give us very large numbers: 30 million non-active people who can be served, (but) less than a million have more than 50,000 pesos in the Housing Subaccountand then you have to analyze the issue of their income”, commented the director of Sadasi.