Although many core cities like New York, Dallas and Chicago have a number of large office projects underway, “I don't see new speculative towers going up that there is not demand for.” In Chicago, for example, developers have broken ground on the 52-story River Point building in response to a very specific demand for more space in the city's West Loop submarket. “In '07 or '08, it didn't matter where it was, if it was vacant land a project was going to go up.”

“I think we have a couple more years of these good times,” Burns adds. But although JLL expects raw material costs to stabilize in 2015, rising labor costs will force up construction costs throughout this expansion. The pain of cost hikes will hit core cities and even secondary markets such as Minneapolis where developers have begun a massive refurbishment of the downtown. JLL reports that even Atlanta, one of the lowest-cost markets, saw a bump up in overall prices for the first time since 2008.

The unemployment rate remains high in the construction industry, indicating a large potential employment pool. However, JLL predicts costs will continue to rise due to productivity issues. “There is a lack of construction workers with the right skills and training, frustrating employers and driving up overall labor costs,” the firm says. “According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lack of available workers with the right training will worsen even as 1.1 million construction jobs are added to the market by 2020.”

“My gut tells me that a fair amount of construction workers have moved on and retired in the past ten years,” says Burns. And the sharp recession convinced many young people who would normally have joined the profession to seek out more stable lines of work. He adds that for a recent project in Texas “we pulled a couple people out of retirement to work on it. There is a dearth of talent.”