Vinyl siding has lost its 25-year lead over stucco as the most popular cladding option for newly constructed homes, while fiber cement gained ground to round out the top three exterior wall materials.

Stucco was installed on 27 percent of the 903,000 single-family houses built in 2019, vinyl cladding on 25 percent and fiber cement on 21 percent. This is evident from the characteristics of new housing data collected in a construction survey conducted by the US Census Bureau.

Of the other materials used for exterior cladding, 20 percent of the new houses were provided with bricks, 5 percent with wood and 2 percent with “others” such as concrete block, stone and aluminum, according to the survey.

In the last shift, stucco increased by 2 percent, fiber cement by 1 percent, vinyl siding and brick by 1 percent each and the use of wood and other materials also remained stable, according to the survey.

The numbers, based on new single family homes completed in 2019, are part of a 1973 database. Vinyl siding has been tracked since 1992 when 23 percent of new homes were in use. That was second only to the 33 percent wood on the wall, but not for long.

Two years later, vinyl siding displaced wood by 1 percent after installing it in 28 percent of new homes. Vinyl siding usage peaked in 2002 when it was installed in 40 percent of 1.325 million new single-family homes.

The affordable, durable, and low-maintenance vinyl siding had a 25-year reign before there was an increase in stucco installations in the south. There, the cement-water-sand mix took the wall portion of brick, the region’s preferred exterior wall material since 1990, and helped set the vinyl siding down.

Steve Booz, Marketing Vice President for Royal Building Products, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, said he was a little surprised with the results, but not worried.

Royal Building Products is owned by Houston-based Westlake Chemical Corp., which had sales of $ 1.3 billion and is the No. 4 manufacturer of pipes, profiles and hoses in North America according to the newly updated ranking by Plastics News.

Booz told Plastics News, “If certain regions are building a larger proportion of homes, the geographic shift may have pushed Stuck to the top of this survey. Vinyl siding remains a strong product choice from the Midwest to the Atlantic and even in the Atlantic Southeast. If these results are due to regions such as the West and Southwest where more houses are being built, we are not finding these results related to. ”

And that’s the case.

The South leads the US in new home construction, and Stucco has grown steadily there for more than 40 years, while in the West it has remained on exterior wall materials for 37 of the past 46 years.

In the south, builders have built more than 400,000 new houses annually since 2016, which gives the fireproof stucco and its variety of earth tones as well as Spanish and Mediterranean qualities an increasing proportion of walls.

Matt Dobson, vice president of the Vinyl Siding Institute, an Alexandria, Virginia-based trade group, also said the survey doesn’t tell the full story of vinyl siding’s popularity.

Dobson said it was important to note that stucco and vinyl siding represent two different categories of exterior siding that indicate regional differences rather than consumer preferences.

“Vinyl and other polymeric products will continue to be recognized for their strong properties, including low maintenance, durability, non-freeze-thaw problems, and high value added,” said Dobson. “And as the industry offers increasingly innovative polymer products, we’re starting to diversify and grow faster in other areas.”

Dobson pointed to advances in architectural polymers like polypropylene siding, insulated vinyl siding, and cellular PVC siding that he believes are creating new opportunities for vinyl siding manufacturers.

“If these new polymer products that are part of our industry were added to the vinyl siding pillar, our total numbers would still be dominant,” Dobson said.

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