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Sumo Stomp
We acquired SumoQuote! Learn more here
🏔️ Peak Performance 2024 is here. Get the report

7-Year High in Construction Spending, 17.1% Increase in Private Residential

The economy might not be booming just yet but, if the latest study from the Associated General Contractors of America is accurate, the construction industry has nothing to worry about.

The study reveals growth in construction spending across almost every sector both during 2015 and over the last 7 years. The biggest gains were in Private Residential, Public, and Educational Facility construction.

Digging Into The Numbers

Construction-related spending in the month of September totaled $1.094 trillion (annual rate is seasonally adjusted), which is 0.6% higher than the total for August and up to 14.1% above the total registered in September 2014. We haven’t had a total this high since March 2008, and year-over-year growth hasn’t been this strong since January 2006.

Public construction had a great showing with 0.7% increase for the month and 9.4% over 12 months ago. Even better than public was educational facilities which showed a growth of 2.4% for the month and 10.5% year-over-year.

However, Private Residential spending was hands down the winner over this most recent period, with spending increasing by 1.9% over the last month and 17.1% over the last 12 months. Particularly interesting was the fact that the rising demand for multifamily residences made up 4.9% this month and a whopping 26.7% increase year-over-year.

Ken Simonson, chief economist of the association, remarks that, “Overall demand for construction continues to grow at a very robust rate. It appears, however, that many firms performing private nonresidential work could not find enough qualified workers in September to keep pace with growing demand.”

Keeping Up With Growing Demand

Our first-hand experience with this growing demand is through our interactions with our customers and the contractors who are looking into using JobNimbus. We frequently come across 3 different kinds of people:

1. Those investigating JobNimbus who aren’t able to handle demand.

We get calls every day from contractors who aren’t able to handle everything. Not only are they understaffed for all the calls coming in, but they’re also trying to hand-write everything from the lead information to the estimates.

All this hand-written information gets thrown into an unnamed folder with out of date information, incomplete files, and forgotten archives. They forget where they put things, they miss appointments, and they lose track of where their jobs are at.

They’re bleeding money during one of the best years for the private residential construction industry in the last 7 years.

But it’s a good thing they found JobNimbus, because it was built to fix all of this and more.

2. JobNimbus customers who aren’t able to handle the demand.

The problem is, we also come across contractors who’ve already started a JobNimbus account but are still having trouble meeting the rising demand of the industry.

The issue with these users is… they aren’t using it. Every once in a while they give us a look into their accounts and they’re almost empty, unused, and forgotten.

But what good is a hammer if you keep it on your tool belt and never take it off? You wouldn’t dare step on a roof to start fixing with your bare hands, so why would you start your work without a powerful tool to get the job done?

If you have a JobNimbus account already and you haven’t used it in a while, let us know how we can help you start again. Your success is our success, so if it’s additional support or training, we’re available for you.

3. JobNimbus customers who are easily handling the demand, and have room for more.

The real winners here are the JobNimbus customers who are looking forward to more growth and taking each case head on with the tools in their belts and a spring in their step.

That’s because they’re diligently entering all their new leads, notes, phone calls, attachments, and financial information into their CRM and project management software. This allows them to pull up a customer’s record at a moment’s notice when they call in, or to assign work and have all the files already associated and ready to go on the mobile app with just a couple clicks.

How You Can Keep Up With Demand

With the industry growing like it is and the prospects looking very positive, you will need to be able to expand to meet the demand. Of course, you could always try to find more help, but no matter how many workers you get up on roofs you still won’t completely solve your problems.

You need a solid, no-compromise solution that empowers you to handle all the leads coming in by remembering their info, categorizing them and storing them in the right place, managing your pipelines for both sales and production, assigning tasks and work orders to the right people, and being able to see your numbers on where to improve as you go.

If you had a rough year because you weren’t able to keep up with demand: rejoice! There’s a solution for you to confront it all head on and end the season triumphant.

 

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