My guess [and its just a guess] is that materials will drop significantly, but just how significantly will depend in part on how China responds to the situation. They are likely to continue to do well in a world economy feeling a lot of price pressure, but will they invest that money overseas in stocks and real estate or continue to build out their own infra-structure?

My thinking is that even if they continue building at the same furious pace and natural disasters like hurricanes keep some demand going domesticly, the materials price trend will definetly be downwards.

But if you are a month away from starting, how much leeway do you have in terms of postponing? Do you have your bids, have you signed a contract?

Frankly, I think this is a better time [from a purely financial standpoint] to be buying than building.

Banks and builders are selling a lot of finished but vacant homes at a substantial loss right now, but they aren't going to build a new one unless they'll make a profit on it.

Yo-yo. Expect the worse (prices and labor going up) and be happy if you do better (prices and labor go down).

But it's true that if I had the money available, and didn't want a truly customized house, I'd buy now and hope to sell at a nice profit within two years. Most folks would be happy just to buy at a bargain (and forget about re-sale). IMO, if you've got money to invest [and lose] then this is a good time to invest and probably profit. But if you have to borrow in order to invest, you'll likely lose -- even low interest rates can rapidly eat up profit margins.

The material bids I got in April 2008 increased approximately 6.25% when recalculated in October 2008.

The biggest one was asphalt shingles, where they believe it's simply gouging at this point, although the manufacturer is using hurricane, hail and the price of oil excuse still. They had another price increase in October despite oil dropping significantly.

The rest is a few bucks here and there per item. But it adds up.

With the economy as it is, and new building permits still low, I really thought prices would be lower now than this spring.

With higher oil prices the liquid asphalt prices are also up -hence higher
shingle prices . I have found that materials are up but labor is down .

Concrete in Texas has gone up 35% in the last month.

I do not see any prices going down, only up. Materials continue to go up and in some cases actually are becoming hard to get. The tradespeople worth using are raising thier prices to cover all overhead cost that are higher.

Through the second quarter of the year, construction costs were up a whopping 18% year over year. And that's with the decline in single-family starts. Most predictions were for the increases to continue, e.g.,here

But will the dramatic meltdown in the financial markets in the last couple weeks and the certainty of a recession impact building costs? I'd bet it would, to the benefit of anyone building. Commercial construction, which had been taking up the slack from reduced residential starts, is bound to slow. And oil prices at around $80 a bbl. can longer be an excuse for raising prices of everything. Just the rise of the $US vs. $C will eventually lower material and energy costs on Canadian imports.

But like oubouris above, I think the deals in existing resales will continue, bailout or not, even though your area has not experienced the declines in places such as Las Vegas and Miami.

I agree with fayemarie, terrypy, mlo 1, and worthy. We are building now and prices for materials have gone up significantly since our original bids. We got bids/prices for materials in June and the actual cost has gone up thousands overall. Our roofing shingles, cedar shingles, and concrete were outrageously expensive. Much more than originally quoted. Roofing alone was $1500 more, up 25% from original price in June.

On the up side, with business being so slow for everyone we are finding labor costs much lower. People are hungry for work. I've had most of our subs take thousands off their prices just to get the job over the next guy.