CONTRACTORS dealing with home renovations and makeovers claim business has plummeted by as much as 50%, due to the difficulty in hiring workers with the required skill set.

Samantha Lim, who runs a Kuala Lumpur home renovation and design company, said prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, her company could easily complete three projects in a month.

Now they can only complete one-and-a-half contracts even after the government gave the green light for foreign workers to return.

“That’s 50% down,” Lim, who has been in the business for 15 years, told The Malaysian Insight.

“It is not difficult to hire foreign workers, but it is difficult to find those with the required skill or experience,” she said.

Lim said searching for workers among locals would be a waste of time.

“They definitely have no interest in working in the home renovation industry.”

Lim said as her company’s ability to deliver on the contracts has slowed down, the new standard practice for her is to inform her customers they will have to wait for the renovation work on their home to begin.

“Many are understanding and are willing to wait,” she said, adding that she is fully booked with orders right up to June.

Rickie Low, who runs a home renovation company, said hiring foreign workers is not only a bureaucratic hassle, but out of reach, due to the costs of hiring them and their high salary demand.

“Our industry is not so lucrative, so it is difficult to hire these workers,” Low said.

“Applying for their permits requires a lot of money. Then, the workers asking for a high salary makes it an unfeasible proposition for many of us.”

He said business was good for a while from June last year until the Chinese New Year, as many homeowners wanted to spruce up their home for the biggest festival in their calendar.

“We were working hard from dawn to dusk, to fulfil the contracts that had piled up.”

Low said now the bubble has burst and the industry is forced to go slow due to the shortage of workers.

He said paying a foreign worker RM80 a day, as the industry would like, would be very unattractive to the worker.

He said he understood the quandary the worker would face with such a daily wage.

“The average cost of a meal now is about RM10. Three meals a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner – would cost RM30.

“On top of that, many of them smoke and drink after work. At the end of it, they probably would be left with only about RM20,” Low said.

He said if he is to follow what other industries pay – RM120 a day – then he and many of his peers would not find that economically viable.

One contractor who bucks the trend is Zeng Ekent Chan who said he does not have a problem in hiring workers as he has an agent who knows how to get them.

Still, Chan admitted that even though it was easy for him to get the workers, many do not have the required skill. He needed to teach them and that was time consuming.

Chan said he has to get the new hands to be an understudy to his more experienced workers.

But that is the least of his worries.

He said since the beginning of the month, the industry had gone into a slow dive.

Chan said his company is now experiencing a “50 to 60%” drop in business.

To make matters worse, he said, homeowners are also slashing their budget to deal with the economic downturn.

“If they had originally intended to spend RM100,000 renovating their home, the budget could now be cut by half.” – March 19, 2023.