Has anyone else seen a huge cut in pricing in the northeast? seems all the guys are working for free or with no markup, we are having a hard time w 5%, we used to get 10-15 all day long up untill 2023, this is not a bizz with low overhead- fuel, ins, work comp. taxes, payroll taxes, bennys, repairs, etc.
I've seen that with customers here in the past. When bids start to dwindle, contractors will do work at cost to keep the doors open
A certain demographic has been driving down wages all over, can't say this is new.
I am assuming you're in the grading/site work business? The ITB's (invitation to bid) coming into my inbox has went from 3-4 daily to if we are lucky 2-3 a week in the last 6-9 months. We are on a decent sized project thru early next year which I am very thankful for. We have been bidding jobs over the last 2 months in order to extend our backlog into 2025 but so far we've landed 0 out of 6 bids. Those bids were with 10% MU on materials and 15% on labor + equipment FWIW. Several commercial projects for long time clients have been tabled after several round of budget pricing due to costs and tenants backing out of pre-leasing. The retail and industrial market has slowed. Residential seems to be holding it's own surprisingly. The institutional/school market is clipping along but that's tax dollars and not free market money. The overall economy is not in good shape from what I am seeing.
I unfortunately agree with what cm1995 is seeing. We usually get 5 or 6 out of 10 bids. I havent gone up in pricing much dispite increasing costs. Lately I've been getting 1 or 2 out of 10 bids. That's getting bad enough I may start charging for bids. That's a lot of running around and writing up stuff for 1 or 2 jobs. Also a lot of my bids really turn into consultations which I really don't want to do for free. This happened on Friday afternoon with a job I went to look at for a nice gentleman. He had some tree problems and needed some corrective pruning work but really didn't know what he needed. I ended up there for an hour because that's how long it took to evaluate his 5 trees and go through it with him. Will it be a complete waste of time? Maybe. It doesn't hurt to sell ourselves on knowledge and equipment vs folks just looking at price alone.
We are not feeling it as bad as other places because this data center market has decided that phx is the place to be That said Comercial is down and I spoke to the owner of a gc we do work for and about 10 of the 20 jobs he had planned this year are awaiting election results according to him The residential work we are getting are for people building retirement or vacation homes a.nd they are pretty high end We have 6 contracts awaiting permits Also have 2 data projects awaiting design to bid I have not dug a restaurant or car wash in almost a year and finally a hotel we have been waiting for almost 7 months has started
I've heard the same thing, and I don't blame them a bit.
I believe the private money is awaiting the election results to see which way to go as well. However ITB's for taxpayer funded projects are clipping along. Mostly university/junior college and municipal projects.
Im not sure people understand the long term effects of this too. People come to the U.S. illegally from countries where they make pennies...............more than willing to work machines for 18hr.................glad im old.