Fernando de Querol Cumbrera
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Since 2020, the industry has faced several challenges that have constrained the building activity of the UK and caused some of the aforementioned expenses to increase. Firstly, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic there have been supply-chain disruptions, which have caused shortages of construction materials. When supply decreases, but demand remains stable, prices tend rise. Additionally, there has also been a shortage of skilled labor, with the number of job vacancies in the construction sector reaching a peak in 2022. Finally, inflation and the increasing energy prices have had an impact on the industry overall, with the annual growth rate of construction costs reaching nearly ten percent in 2022. Nevertheless, many of those factors have started to cool off since then, and as a consequence that growth rate was much lower in 2023 than a year earlier.Construction costs worldwide
Some of the most affordable cities to construct a high rise were located in China, Southeast Asia, and South Africa. New York was on the other side of the spectrum, closely followed by London, Sydney, and Hong Kong. There were also other cities in the U.S. with very high residential construction costs, such as Honolulu and San Francisco. The latter was in fact the U.S. city at the top of the ranking for multi-family housing, with an average expense of 513 U.S. dollars per square foot. Along with the entries above, Switzerland was also a really expensive place to build in: Geneva and Zurich were the two cities with the highest construction costs in Europe. London was the third city in that ranking, with a figure just below 4,000 U.S. dollars per square meter.
