Vatterot agrees that price erosion is one of the blights marring high-volume projects, and adds that use of base-line materials and poor scheduling and jobsite conditions has further removed his company’s incentive to serve those accounts. “Often, the roofer is called out to the job before the plywood has been installed and he orders the material before he sees the project, so we may arrive at the project and can’t deliver the material,” Vatterot says. “When delivering, the site conditions couldn’t be worse and we have to be towed out about 10 percent of the time. But I wouldn’t turn production builder business away—we do pursue it, but we pursue it with our eyes open and try to make it win-win, and if it is not, we just walk.”
Still, specialty houses are keeping notes on the production market as construction in general becomes both time and price sensitive. “As we become more national, we’re talking to nontraditional customers, end users like tract builders,” says Gagnon. “We don’t really want to sell [directly to] them, but we need to know what they are up to and what their plans are.[A national builder] could make a decision in Florida that could affect us on the West Coast overnight.”
For many specialty players, raw material costs upstream are beginning to have an additional adverse effect on prices. Roofing and fastener distributors, in particular, have been experiencing some cost inflation due to the rise in crude oil and steel, respectively. Dealers Service and Supply is beginning to look at some alternative roofing materials—including vinyl—to test products and supply chain relationships in the hope that the distributor can reap the benefits when “the price of oil reaches levels beyond affordability,” Vatterot says.
That type of planning and market adaptability is exactly what most specialty distributors highlight as the key component to their success moving forward.
“I can’t point to one specific trend shaping our market right now,” says Stevens. “The primary opportunity as a specialty distributor lies in being able to adapt to market trends and changes as they occur.” Like Marco Supply, most specialty distributors haven’t seen any drastic changes in construction practices over the past 10 to 15 years, further emphasizing the need for daily service execution and seamless product availability and delivery. “We need to be transparent to that subcontractor,” Gagnon says. “We don’t exist—they just want it to happen.”
Indeed, from maintaining acres of inventory to communicating product applications to a diverse range of customers, specialty distributors will continue to “make it happen” as the specialty sales role in construction supply evolves. “Being a specialty distributor is both a focus and a philosophy,” Lansing says. “As good as we are, we can always get better.”
