In a holding yard behind Shellharbour Airport, Julian Brown is standing in front of a giant orange and red concrete pumping truck.
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Mr Brown's business, Master Civil Concrete Pumping, bought the 36 metre boom pump as business was picking up in the civil and domestic market.
Then, after the brief shutdown of the construction industry due to COVID, Mr Brown was ready to put the new truck to use but in November last year, the rain began and the truck has barely left the yard since.
"The purchase of the boom, that's a massive expansion," Mr Brown said.
The summer of 2021-22 was one of the wettest the Illawarra experienced in decades and was followed by the wettest autumn on record.
These conditions have made for a difficult period of Mr Brown's business.
"We've had so much rain that we can't get on sites, they're all wet. Concrete can't be poured because it's wet all the time," he said.
Even when the sun would come out in between rainy days, the sodden ground prevented access, further delaying any work from getting done.
"Everything's been pushed back," Mr Brown said.
The unusually wet weather has come at a time when the building industry has been increasingly stretched.
Dr Tillman Boehme is the supply chain lead at the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre at the University of Wollongong and has been watching the confluence of factors hitting the construction sector.
"We had extreme weather events so construction sites were shut, but this problem actually started a lot earlier," he said.
The bushfires of 2020 tore through swathes of pine forest that supplies timber for the building industry. Then, COVID and border closures disrupted imports of other materials.
One of the government's signature measures to help the economy recover from COVID was the HomeBuilder scheme, supercharging demand for home renovations.
"You had a supply shortage, and you had a surge in demand," Dr Boehme said.
On top of all of these factors, a surge in fuel prices has hit the diesel-reliant sector.
"Diesel prices have gone up, and we can't charge any more for the job," Mr Brown said.
While other industries may be able to vary prices and pass on increased costs, construction contracts are signed at the beginning of a project, sometimes more than a year before work starts. This means that when companies break ground, they are locked into projects that will cost more than they bring in. In addition, funds are only released when milestones are reached.
"Once the slab is poured, that's where normally a progress payment occurs," Dr Boehme said. "But if you can't build for two months or three months, you don't meet that progress payment."
Most dramatically, this had led to major companies such as ProBuild going bust and large builders such as Metricon only just hanging on, with thousands of unfinished houses left in the balance.
This has left small businesses, like Master Civil Concrete Pumping, waiting for payments that may never eventuate.
"We are a small, family business, but we haven't been able to employ as many people as we wanted to," he said.
Dr Boehme said it is likely there will continue to be adjustments in the sector over the next three to six months as builders work through a backlog of jobs and supply constraints continue.
To account for these challenges, Dr Boehme is working with companies to prefabricate more components, so not as much work has to be done on site at the mercy of the weather.
Mr Brown said with drier weather as winter sets in, he's getting back to work.
"This week, with the sun out, we're excited that we can move forward," he said.
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