Few Silver Linings for Construction in 2012

The difficult economic environment has left many home-building businesses bruised and battered. Less than 10 percent of respondents rated the health of their firm as very good and more than a quarter consider their company to be in weak or very weak condition.

On the brighter side, nearly half of respondents (49.7 percent) said their firms were in at least good financial health, and four-fifths (80.2 percent) said their companies would at least hold steady in revenue in 2012.

Looking toward 2012, nearly half of respondents (46.8 percent) of the Professional Builder’s 2012 Market Outlook Survey said they thought their companies would be beefing up PR and marketing initiatives to revive their businesses.

The recession is weighing heavily on architects, engineers, and contractors. If the results of an exclusive survey of 504 professionals are any measure of the commercial construction industry’s outlook on business prospects for 2012.

More than three-fourths of respondents (78.4 percent) rated general economic conditions (i.e., recession) as the most important concern their firms will face in the next year, followed by competition from other firms (40.1 percent) and lack of capital funding for their projects (34.5 percent).

Nearly three in four (74.8 percent) described the current business situation for their firms as very to intensely competitive—a strong verification of the dog-eat-dog climate that many in the AEC industry have reported anecdotally in the last couple of years.

On the brighter side, nearly half of respondents (49.7 percent) said their firms were in at least good financial health, and four-fifths (80.2 percent) said their companies would at least hold steady in revenue in 2012.

Layoffs over the last two years were reported by 44.8 percent of respondents, with another 37.3 percent saying that hours had been reduced, while more than half (51 percent) said their firms had eliminated or cut back on bonuses.

Looking toward 2012, nearly half of respondents (46.8 percent) said they thought their companies would be beefing up PR and marketing initiatives to revive their businesses.

More than a third (35.7 percent) said their firms would be pumping dollars into technology. However, more than one in five (20.6 percent) said their firms were not using building information modeling; of those who said BIM was used in their shops, a clear majority (58.4 percent) said BIM figured in less than 25 percent of projects, while only slightly more than one-fourth (26.8 percent) said BIM was being used most of the time (i.e., 50 percent or more of projects, based on dollar value).

– Courtesy of Building Design & Construction