Conflicting Construction News

According to an article on Bloomberg, the construction market is so tight that a firm in Montana is using a private jet to fly construction workers to job sites.

"One Montana-based firm told the Minneapolis Fed that it’s been hiring a private jet to fly construction workers to where they’re needed."

The article goes on to talk about a strong labor market and so on. The company states that it would like to use local workers but cannot find any and that it is economical to just fly them in on a private jet.  This all seems a little absurd...

On the flip side, an economist from the American Builders and Contractors (ABC) states that the construction job market sharply declined. 

“Today’s construction job openings number was simply shocking,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “While the total number of job openings economywide stood at a lofty 10.8 million at the end of January, meaning that there are still nearly two job openings for every unemployed American, the number of construction job openings plummeted from 488,000 in December to 248,000 just one month later, according to the JOLTS report. In other words, almost one-half of all construction job openings disappeared in a single month."

Some of the reports coming out can be tied to the decline in single family housing construction but there a lot of conflicting information here as well. In general, everyone is expecting the construction to grow with all the money being pumped into infrastructure projects but that is just one segment. 

In other types of projects, someone needs to fund them and interest rates are expected to continue to rise in the coming months to keep inflation in check and that will slow down some types of new projects.

Part of the problem is that the markets are more complex and harder to analyze than one might thing. We tend to over generalize construction and use broad sets of data for analysis that do not always give a complete picture.

What trends are you seeing? We would love to hear form you. Leave us a comment below or email us at news@ph1c.com