Concrete shortage impacting construction companies in Southern Arizona

The business name Concrete Done with Love was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

As we continue to see a spike in housing demand and commercial real estate, local builders are having a hard time getting concrete. Several local concrete companies say they are on allocation when it comes to getting concrete from the major suppliers.

"Well it's very difficult to get concrete in a timely way. And like this project in itself, I ordered the concrete two weeks ago and I got it two weeks later," Kurt Luscombe, President of Concrete Done with Love said.

With the many supply chain issues, concrete has been put in the mix, making it hard to meet growing demands for builders.

"It started about a month ago and from what I understand the ready mix concrete plants are on allocation," Luscombe said. "So they can't get as much cement to make concrete as they used to so suddenly everybody's getting less concrete."

From driver shortages, to plants being shutdown for maintenance or other issues, the problem seems to be a mixed bag.

"With CalPortland allocating everybody. You can't get just whatever you want. You have to you have to take your share, like everybody is doing," Darrel Hurt Sr., Plant Manager at Paragon Building Products said. "So CalPortland has enough inventory to cover the companies that they sell to now, when they go to shut down and do the repairs that they're going to be doing."

Making it harder to get concrete and leaving some out of work.

In my field there's like finishers that basically just placed in finished concrete," Luscombe said. "And some of those guys also do setup work. And so we can keep them busy doing setup work, but at some point if we can't get concrete then we won't have enough work for the finishers."