Kent Pecoy on the Trade Talent Crisis Quietly Reshaping Luxury Construction

Florida’s master builder on why the next decade of high-end homebuilding will be defined not by design trends but by who can still swing a hammer correctly.

Kent Pecoy has built more than 1,500 homes across Southwest Florida in 45 years of business. Ask him what worries him about the next decade of luxury construction and he does not point to interest rates, insurance markets, or hurricane seasons. He points to the people who actually build the houses.

“We are losing a generation of tradespeople and we have not replaced them,” Pecoy said. “That is the story nobody in this industry wants to talk about, and it is going to determine which firms are still standing in ten years.”

The numbers behind the worry

The U.S. construction industry is contending with a shortage that has been building for two decades. The 2008 housing crash pushed a generation of skilled tradespeople out of the field, and many never returned. The high schools that once funneled students into apprenticeships now funnel them toward four-year degrees. The result, as documented by industry groups including Associated Builders and Contractors, is a workforce gap measured in the hundreds of thousands.

For volume builders, the gap shows up as longer timelines and higher labor costs. For luxury builders like Pecoy, it shows up as a quieter, more existential problem. The level of craftsmanship that a custom estate requires depends on a small pool of master carpenters, finish carpenters, stone masons, and millworkers who learned their trade over decades. When that pool shrinks, no spreadsheet adjustment can put the skill back.

“You can train somebody to frame a wall in a few months,” Pecoy said. “You cannot train somebody to hang a 14 foot piece of casework in a coastal climate in a few months. That is years of work. That is a relationship with the material.”

How Pecoy is responding

Rather than wait for the labor market to correct itself, Kent Pecoy & Sons Construction has built what amounts to an in-house pipeline. The firm employs long-tenured tradespeople directly, runs structured mentorship between senior and junior craftsmen, and partners with regional trade programs to identify candidates earlier in their careers than most luxury builders ever do.

Pecoy is also candid about pay. The firm has chosen to compensate its craftsmen at the top of the regional market, on the theory that a master carpenter who can build the kind of work his clients expect is worth substantially more than the going rate. That decision shows up in his cost structure, and he does not apologize for it.

“If a client wants a Pecoy home, part of what they are paying for is the fact that the same finish carpenter who started on their living room is still here for the punch list,” he said. “That is not free. It should not be free.”

Why this matters for buyers

For high-end buyers entering the Florida market, Pecoy argues the trade talent question is the single most underweighted variable in their decision-making. Buyers tend to evaluate builders on portfolio, price, and timeline. They rarely ask how many of the people on the jobsite are direct employees, how long the firm has worked with its key subcontractors, or what the average tenure of its lead carpenters is.

Those, Pecoy says, are the questions that actually predict whether a home will be built well.

“The portfolio shows you what a firm built ten years ago,” he said. “The crew tells you what they can build today.”

A narrowing field

Pecoy expects the trade talent crisis to thin the ranks of luxury builders over the next decade in a way the market has not yet fully absorbed. Firms that built their model on flexible subcontractor labor will struggle to maintain quality as that labor pool tightens. Firms that invested in their own craftsmen will be able to deliver what the high end of the market actually wants.

“This industry is about to separate,” Pecoy said. “The builders who treated their trades as a cost center are going to find out they bet wrong. The ones who treated them as the business itself are going to be just fine.”