In the cycles we live in, nothing is ever in balance. Five years ago, there was plenty of labor available, but a minimum of projects. Now we’re seeing an ever increasing list of opportunities out there. I see the shortage of skilled labor increasing, along with skilled subcontractors, architects and building contractors. A substantial amount …
For us, monitoring and documenting jobsite progress is important for a number of reasons. Being able to see a job’s development is a value-add for the customer, giving them peace of mind when it’s not easy to visit the site. Our project managers have an easier time overseeing jobs in a wide geographic area when …
We recently started work on the renovation of a 100-year-old structure in the city as the Construction Manager for The Lyric Theatre, a project which has proved interesting for many reasons. One is the history lesson we are getting about construction practices in 1913. The foundations, rebar and structural steel have proven particularly interesting. We …
Most years, things slow down around Christmas. Many people take time off to be with family, and the last two weeks of December are usually touch and go. Except this year. Five days before Christmas, we still have phones ringing, email notifications chiming and bids churning. From our boots on the ground perspective, it seems …
Each quarter, I meet with a handful of real estate and construction executives to discuss what we’re seeing and the broader implications for the region. Our gathering this week included a visit with a DOT Director, John Cooper. A state’s DOT decisions are often the lynchpins in a development, so the trends are definitely worth …
We built our first segmental wall in Charlottesville, Virginia about 20 years ago. I was recently passing through there and saw that the wall is still standing, just as we built it in the early 90s. At the time, the locals called it “the Great Wall of Charlottesville.” It was pretty tall for that time–32 …
The other day, I was thinking about how the web and technology have created new words in our everyday vocabulary. For instance how many times do you say “I’ll Google it?” Ten years ago, no one would have known what you where talking about. In the same vein, “just PDF it to me,” “tweet it,” …
Someone once said to me, “Most of the good sites are taken.” While I’m not sure this is exactly true, the last few decades have given us new techniques for “challenging” soils, adding new tools to our toolbox. Previously un-developable sites can now be developed in a cost-effective manner. Over the last few years, we …
To me, newspaper coverage aside, the economic climate still boils down to what’s happening with the boots on the ground, to us. The big trends will be in the newspaper, and they are good national or global indicators. But this is really our neighborhood. Smaller companies make 99.7 percent of business transactions and 46 percent …
While our economy continues to move along, we are seeing pockets of great expansion. In other areas things are moving more slowly. In regards to the market cost, some of our customers have asked how we see things changing. I used to think that material prices were controlled mainly by supply and demand, but that …
In the 1960s, the amount of office space allocated to an individual was a direct indicator of your status at a company. Bigger was better, with CEOS working in sprawling square footage, and folks lower on the totem pole being relegated to large “bullpens.” Furniture maker Herman Miller made a dent in this philosophy when …
Growing up, I often visited South Georgia, where my father told me what it was like in the early days of a cotton farmer. As I recall, they would plant the same crop annually, repeating year after year. There were lots of reasons for this of course–I am certainly not chucking spears at the farmers–but …