Things are overwhelming for everyone; most notably for painting contractors. There is simply one factor that makes it this way. It’s a lot of things that have happened together to produce the perfect image storm to take down the entire paint industry. Let’s look at some of the reasons why things are the way they are, as a result, we will be able to have a better understanding of the problems.

. Unemployment figure: 10% and growing. This puts the clients we work for out of work and gives them more time at home to do things like paint the house. Also, they cannot cover the expenses of their houses, so they paint their houses personally to try to sell them.

. Foreclosures – Banks are repossessing monumental numbers of homes and are unwilling to put cash into these homes to get the best price for them.

. First-time homebuyers: They aren’t too thrilled with the idea of ​​dishing out cash to paint their homes due to employment concerns and the fact that most have used up most of their money just buying their home.

. Long-Term Investment Buyers: Nice group of clients to know about, but most often produce their own employees who do this variety of work for ten percent of what you need to charge as a painting contractor.

. New Homes – This particular category has almost come to a standstill and I have witnessed interior painting companies that relied on nothing more than contacts with home developers and didn’t know how to do their own jobs now file for bankruptcy.

. Refinancing – When all the refinancing became available, our backers had loads of capital available. At this point, the banks don’t want to refinance anyone by giving our regular customers negative cash flow.

. Overflooded Housing Market – If there are a lot of houses on the street around the neighborhood that are foreclosed on, they are probably driving home values ​​down and the emotional impact of the “Above Average Effect” is affected as well. That’s exactly the phenomenon that pushed them to jump out and buy a new Lexus because the neighbors had one. You are currently working in contradiction with your company.

. Contractors Aren’t Busy: Once general contractors get slow, they stop outsourcing work and start doing all the work from start to finish, including house painting.

. Unemployed painters – that’s right, he did what he had to do as a painting contractor, he reduced his painting crew to you and perhaps another. Let’s examine what happened to the individual employees your company laid off. Several may have returned to their birthplace, but some stayed and today these uninsured and unlicensed house painters became their direct rival. They need to earn a living and surely they can do it for a lesser amount because they don’t have all the overhead that you carry. On Tuesday my wife did a listing for $7001, a different guy put one up for $6501 and that’s fine and then a house painter, who painted a house down the street and had personal references from the owners, a friend came over and bid $3900!! What the hell! The painter could have bid $6499 and still got the job, but he was just the employee of the company who painted the friends house down the street. He fired him, he went back to all the houses he had painted under his bosses company and handed over his card. He had no idea how to make an offer to paint a house, so he made a very small offer. This is happening all the time, right now.

. HGTV: Unemployed customers have extra time to watch TV and they pay attention to this TV show and they think they can do anything.

In closing, I would like to say that it is easy to attribute our trials in the paint industry to one group, but as you have seen, it is much more than that. Only the strongest will survive this and I am determined to be one of them. For my part, I hold the edge over most only because my wife and I are painters and I’m great at marketing. The paint price war has started and I’m going to win!