By Caleb Tobin, Owner and President, Duet Build
Caleb Tobin is the owner and president of Duet Build, part of the Duet family of firms alongside Duet Design (interior design), Duet Forma (architecture), and Duet Edit (home stewardship). He holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Colorado and a Juris Doctor from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Before Duet Build, he served as a project manager and senior architect in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and as a construction and real estate attorney at Faegre Baker Daniels. Duet’s projects span Denver, the Front Range, and Colorado’s mountain communities.
I’ve been having a version of the same conversation with prospective clients for the past year or so, and it goes something like this: they come in having done their research, portfolio reviewed, references checked, a list of good questions about finishes and timelines. Then we start talking about what the market actually looks like right now, and I watch their expression change. Not alarm exactly. More like the recognition that the decision they thought they were making is a different decision than it used to be.
They’re not wrong to be confused. The custom home building market in 2026 looks nothing like it did five years ago, and the criteria that made a builder a smart choice in 2019 don’t fully apply anymore. If you’re planning a significant build or renovation right now, I think it’s worth being honest about what’s actually changed and why it matters more than most people in my industry are willing to say out loud.
A quick note on where I’m writing from, because it shapes what follows. Duet Build is the construction arm of a family of four entities. On a typical build project, three of them are directly involved: Duet Build, Duet Forma (our architecture practice), and Duet Design (the interior design studio my wife Devon founded and leads). A fourth entity, Duet Edit, focuses on ongoing home stewardship after a project is complete. The three project-phase firms share a leadership structure and coordinate on projects from the earliest stages, which is unusual in this industry and, I’d argue, increasingly important given what the market is doing. I’ll come back to why that matters, but I want you to know that context up front rather than have it surface halfway through.
The Market Has Shifted in Ways That Aren't Going Back
Before I get into the specifics of what’s changed, I want to set the current numbers apart from the argument itself. The percentages and dollar figures below reflect the market as of mid-2026 and will move over time. The underlying argument, that the pressures affecting your project are structural rather than cyclical, will not.
Market Snapshot: Mid-2026
Labor. According to Associated Builders and Contractors, the industry needs to attract approximately 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to meet current demand, before accounting for growth. That figure climbs to 456,000 in 2027 as spending growth is projected to resume. The deeper problem is structural: the National Center for Construction Education and Research projects that roughly 41 percent of today’s construction workforce will retire by 2031. Training pipelines take five to seven years to produce a fully skilled tradesperson. That math doesn’t close on its own.
Materials. Canadian softwood lumber, which accounts for roughly 85 percent of U.S. lumber imports, now carries a 45 percent combined duty rate. Steel and aluminum tariffs have reached 50 percent in some categories. Kitchen cabinets and vanities are subject to a 25 percent tariff, with a scheduled increase to 50 percent that was delayed until January 2027 but remains on the calendar.
Cost impact on new homes. The National Association of Home Builders’ most recent estimates put tariff-related costs at $7,500 to $10,900 per typical new home, based on their March forecast and May builder survey. Independent modeling by the Center for American Progress puts the figure closer to $17,500 per home once broader supply-chain effects are included. The gap between those numbers is itself informative — the volatility is real, and different methodologies produce different answers.
Broader cost movement. The Engineering News-Record Building Cost Index rose 4.2 percent in 2025. Nonresidential construction input prices surged at an annualized rate of 12.6 percent during the first two months of 2026, per ABC’s analysis — the fastest pace since the supply chain disruptions of early 2022, driven largely by tariff-affected materials.
Timelines and delays. Residential construction timelines that once averaged six to eight months are now routinely stretching to nine to twelve. Roughly 45 percent of construction firms report project delays directly attributable to worker shortages.
None of this is meant to alarm anyone. I’m laying it out because the questions you should be asking a builder have changed, and nobody benefits from pretending otherwise. A builder who can’t tell you specifically how they’re managing these pressures probably doesn’t have a real answer.
The Old Criteria Still Matter. They're Just Not Enough.
Five years ago, a thorough builder evaluation looked something like this: review the portfolio, check the references, ask about licensing and insurance, get a sense of communication style, and make sure the budget conversation felt honest. These are still necessary. I wouldn’t skip any of them.
But they’re not sufficient anymore, because they don’t tell you anything about the things that are most likely to determine how your project actually goes.
Does the builder have real trade relationships, or just a vendor list?
This is the question I’d press hardest on right now, and it’s the one most clients don’t think to ask.
In a labor market this constrained, a builder’s ability to get the right people on your project, and to hold onto them, is everything. Timelines slip when a framing crew isn’t available when you need them. Budgets shift when a plumbing subcontractor suddenly has three competing offers and walks. Quality suffers when a builder has to fill gaps with whoever’s available rather than whoever’s right for the work.
The builders managing this well aren’t the ones paying the highest wages to whoever will show up. They’re the ones who have built genuine long-term relationships with skilled trade partners over years. Relationships where the subcontractor prioritizes their projects because they know how that builder runs a job, they know they’ll be paid on time, they know the communication will be clear. Those relationships took a long time to build, and you can’t manufacture them in a bad market by throwing money at the problem.
When I look at how Duet Build manages this, part of what makes it work is that the people coming onto our projects aren’t strangers to the way we operate. They’ve worked alongside our team before. They know what Duet Forma’s drawings look like, how Devon’s design team communicates about finish selections, how decisions get made. That familiarity changes the quality of the work, and it changes the timeline. When Duet Design, Duet Forma, and Duet Build are all operating as a coordinated unit from the earliest stages, the people in the field aren’t interpreting separate contracts from separate firms. They’re executing a project that was designed with construction realities in mind from day one.
That’s not something you replicate quickly, even if you can write a bigger check.
Does the builder have a real process for managing material volatility?
I was talking with a client recently who had been given a project estimate by another builder, and the estimate came with a note saying costs were “subject to market conditions.” I understand why builders do this. The material market is genuinely unpredictable right now. But that language, as written, provides essentially no protection to the client. It just shifts the uncertainty from the builder’s risk column to the client’s surprise column, usually discovered around month six of a project.
To give that some concrete grounding: Canadian softwood lumber currently carries a 45 percent combined duty rate. Steel and aluminum tariffs have reached 50 percent in some categories. Kitchen cabinets and vanities are subject to a 25 percent tariff. The Engineering News-Record Building Cost Index rose 4.2 percent in 2025, and construction input prices surged at an annualized rate of 12.6 percent in just the first two months of 2026, driven largely by tariff-affected materials. These are not projections. They are the current baseline.
A builder who has been through real material volatility, who has had to manage tariff impacts on a project mid-stream, has usually learned a few things. You lock in pricing on long-lead materials as early as realistically possible. You identify domestic sourcing alternatives before you need them, not after a tariff announcement makes an import line item untenable. You build an honest contingency, not a paper-thin one. And you have the conversation about material cost risk with the client at the beginning of a project, not when an invoice arrives that changes the budget.
I won’t pretend there’s a way to fully insulate a project from the current market. There isn’t. But there’s a significant difference between a builder who manages that volatility through a deliberate process and one who simply passes it to the client as a discovered cost. Ask specifically how they handle it. The answer will tell you a lot about how the rest of the project will go.
Does the builder understand what they're actually committing to before they commit?
This one sounds obvious until you start pressing on it.
The custom home market in 2026 is full of builders who are accepting more projects than they can realistically deliver, because demand is strong and saying no is difficult. Residential construction timelines have stretched across the industry, and a significant portion of that stretching traces back to builders who took on projects without the labor capacity to execute them, then found themselves rationing crew time across too many active sites simultaneously.
I’m deliberate about what I take on. I’ve made the mistake of accepting too much in the past, early in my career, and I know exactly what it does to a project and to a client relationship. It’s not a mistake I repeat. Part of evaluating a builder in 2026 is understanding their current backlog honestly, not just what their projected capacity looks like if everything goes according to plan.
Ask them directly: how many active projects do you have right now, and what’s your current trade capacity? If they’re vague, that’s information. If they have a clear answer and it’s followed by a cogent explanation of how your project fits into that capacity, that’s also information, and it’s the kind that actually tells you something.
What the Shift in Criteria Actually Means for the Evaluation Process
I get asked to compare builders a lot, usually in situations where a client is evaluating two or three options and wants a framework for making the decision. Here’s how I’d think about it right now.
Start with the fundamentals. Portfolio quality matters. References matter. Licensing, insurance, and financial stability matter. Don’t skip these. But assume, for the sake of argument, that you’ve cleared those bars with more than one builder. Here’s where I’d focus the differentiating questions.
Ask about a specific project that hit a significant challenge mid-build. Not about how they’ve managed their best work, but about how they’ve managed something that went wrong. A material delay that extended a timeline. A subcontractor who became unavailable. A site condition that required a significant design response mid-project. How they handled that problem, and specifically how they communicated about it with the client, will tell you more about what your experience will be than anything their portfolio communicates.
Ask who, specifically, will be on your project. Not just the principal’s name. The superintendent. The project manager. How many other projects are they currently managing? Will those people be dedicated primarily to your build, or will they be splitting time? It’s worth knowing this up front, because the answer to this question changes significantly once a project is underway and a builder’s attention is divided.
Ask what their contingency planning looks like for the current material environment. Not whether they have a contingency line in their estimate, but how they actually think about managing cost volatility during a build that will stretch over twelve to eighteen months. What materials have they already priced and locked in? What items are they sourcing domestically to avoid tariff exposure? What happens if a specified item becomes unavailable mid-construction?
Ask about the pre-construction phase specifically. What happens during the months before a shovel goes into the ground? How are trade partners engaged? How are material costs established and protected? A builder who treats pre-construction as a formality to get through quickly tends to produce projects where the problems arrive exactly when you’d expect: once the real work has started and the decisions are hardest to reverse.
And ask about their relationships. Who are their primary trade partners in plumbing, electrical, framing? How long have they been working with those people? Can they speak specifically to why those relationships exist and why those are the people they trust on complex residential work?
These questions don’t have easy answers, and a builder who answers them glibly is probably doing it by reflex rather than from actual process. The ones worth hiring usually pause before they respond.
What a Good First Meeting Should Actually Feel Like
I want to add one more thing, because I think it matters and it doesn’t get said often enough in this industry.
By the end of a first serious conversation with a builder, a client should feel like they understand what they’re getting into. Not a sales pitch. Not a polished presentation of best-case scenarios. A clear-eyed picture of what the project involves, what the current market conditions mean for their specific scope and timeline, and what the builder’s process actually looks like once a project is underway.
If a builder is only showing you the version of your project that makes it look simple and fully controllable, that’s telling you something. The best projects I’ve run are the ones where the client walked in knowing what they were signing up for, including the hard parts, and chose to do it anyway with their eyes open. The worst projects I’ve seen in this industry, the ones that end in conflict and frustration, almost always trace back to a first meeting where someone oversold the ease of the process to get a contract signed.
I don’t want clients who didn’t know what the last eighteen months of their lives would involve. That’s not the kind of working relationship that produces the result either side is hoping for.
So when you’re evaluating builders, pay attention to whether they’re telling you the truth in that first meeting. Are they being specific about what they don’t know yet? Are they giving you a realistic timeline that accounts for the current permitting and trade environment, or an optimistic one designed to get past your objections? Are they talking about your project or performing for it?
These are the things you can read in a room. Trust that reading.
Why Process Is Now the Real Differentiator
I want to come back to something I said earlier, because I think it’s the most important thing in this piece.
The builders who will consistently deliver strong outcomes in this market are not necessarily the ones with the most impressive portfolios or the longest project histories. They’re the ones with the most disciplined processes, the ones who have built their operations specifically for a world where labor is constrained, materials are volatile, and communication has to be constant and clear even when the news isn’t good.
I have a background that makes me think about building the way an architect and an attorney would, not just a contractor. My Master of Architecture and my law degree weren’t a detour. They were how I learned to read a project in full, to see the legal and regulatory implications of a design decision as clearly as the structural ones, to anticipate what happens three phases from now when a decision gets made today. I’m not telling you this to credential-drop. I’m telling you because this kind of background produces a very specific attitude toward process: it has to be real, it has to be disciplined, and it has to hold under pressure.
The same is true of how Duet Build works with Duet Forma on the architectural side and with Duet Design on the interior side. When those three disciplines are genuinely coordinated, the process advantages compound. The structural engineer’s decisions get made with the interior designer’s program in mind. The construction sequencing accounts for how Devon’s finish selections will actually be installed. When a field condition raises a question about a detail, the answer comes from people who were in the room when that detail was designed. Nobody is reconstructing intent from a set of drawings they didn’t participate in producing.
I’ve seen what happens when that coordination is absent, because I’ve stepped into projects where it was. Where an architect and a builder were interpreting each other’s decisions at arm’s length and the client was caught in the middle. Where a finish selection created a substrate problem that nobody caught until the wall was closed. Where a structural requirement changed a ceiling height that a designer had already specified custom lighting around. These are expensive, time-consuming problems. In a market that’s already under pressure, they’re the kind of problems that don’t stay contained.
The Question I'd Ask Myself
If I were a client evaluating builders right now, here’s the question I’d sit with: in a market where the forces working against my project are structural and not going away, which builder has built their operation to manage those forces rather than simply hoping they don’t affect this particular project?
That’s a harder thing to assess than reviewing a portfolio. It requires having actual conversations and listening carefully to how a builder talks about their work, their people, and their process. It requires asking questions that don’t have easy answers and paying attention to whether the builder treats those questions seriously or deflects them.
I think most discerning clients, when they sit across from a builder and start asking the right questions, can feel the difference between someone who has built their operation for this market and someone who hasn’t. What I’m suggesting is that you trust that read. The portfolio and the references are table stakes. What matters in 2026 is what’s behind them.
This Is Not a Simple Decision. It Shouldn't Be.
I’m aware that none of this makes the builder selection process easier. In some ways, it makes it harder. The number of meaningful questions has grown, the variables are more complex, and the cost of getting it wrong has increased alongside the cost of the build itself.
What I’d offer instead of simplicity is clarity. The criteria have changed. The market has changed. The questions that reveal the quality of a builder’s operation have changed. If you go into this decision with the right framework, you’re not just protecting your project. You’re increasing the probability of a working relationship that actually serves the experience you’re hoping to have, through all eighteen or twenty months of it.
The builders who get that right in 2026 are the ones who have built their operations for exactly this environment. The ones who understand that trade relationships are assets, not transactions. That material volatility requires actual process, not a contingency line. That labor capacity is something to be planned honestly, not optimistically.
When that combination of discipline and expertise extends across architecture, construction, and interior design, as it does when Duet Forma, Duet Build, and Duet Design are working together on a project, the client gets something that’s genuinely difficult to replicate through independent relationships coordinated in real time: a team that was already aligned before the first shovel went into the ground. That alignment is, in my experience, what actually separates a project that performs from one that merely gets finished.
If you’re in the early stages of planning a custom home or renovation and want to have a real conversation about how to navigate this market, reach out to our team. We’ll start with where you are and figure out the right next step together.
