Why Is Texas Doing So Much Better Than Other States?

May 23, 2010 – While the majority of the United States is still deep in the throes of recession and economic hardship, the state of Texas has been having a very strong 2010. The bonds for Harris County recently received a AAA rating from Moody’s and housing prices along with home sales have actually been [...]

Jobtrio.com Releases 6-Month Traffic Numbers

Santa Barbara, California – April 4th, 2010 – The construction contractor directory and profile website, Jobtrio.com, has released its visitor traffic numbers for the last six months of operation. Since October, the quantity of visitors to the site has nearly tripled, surpassing 34,000 visitors for the month of March. “We couldn’t be happier with the [...]

Cautionary Words About Green Technologies

February 2, 2010 – Lately, I am continually reading articles in which government officials talk about exploiting new technologies to make a residential or commercial building more energy efficient, and I shake my head. I have years of first-hand knowledge of the actual complexity and enormous hassle that goes along with almost all of the [...]

Contractors Just Need to Weather Winter

November 23, 2009 – With all of the news about the continued lag of an economic rebound for the nation’s construction industry, I think it is important to keep in mind the seasonal variations which, even during the most bull of times, the building industry is apt to experience. Most economists agree that the US [...]

High-Speed Rail Could Stimulate California Construction

June 13, 2009 – It appears that the construction of a massive high-speed passenger rail system may be in California’s near future. On a national level, the Obama Administration has pledged approximately $13 billion of stimulus and other funding in order to bolster the country’s struggling rail roads. California stands as one of the most [...]

Infrastructure Stimulus Jumpstarts California Construction

June 1, 2009 – As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act infrastructure project, California has already laid claim to almost $1 billion of funding by identifying over 80 infrastructure improvement construction projects.  This is a good thing.  States which do not claim their funding from the Federal Highway Administration by June 30 will [...]

San Francisco Contractors To Get Room To Work

In some encouraging news, it sounds like San Francisco contractors are on the path to getting treated more justly by the city’s Safe Paths of Travel (SPOT) program, which enforces pedestrian and traffic safety around building sites.For a long time now, I have been hearing complaints from my friends in the downtown area of SF [...]

California Construction Permits on the Rise

There are hopeful indications that California builders are clearing out their inventory due to the tax credit recently made available and are starting to build again. During the month of April, the acquisition of single-family home building permits was up 21 percent over March, according to the California Building Industry Association.  Specifically, San Diego construction [...]

California Unemployment and Construction Contractors

In late March, the Employment Development Department of California released the state’s unemployment data, with numbers up through February 2009.   Overall, this report paints a grim picture of California’s ecomnomic status, and in particular, the health of the construction industry.  Here are a couple key statistics and I would like to discuss what they [...]

Experts (And the Numbers) Indicate California Construction on Path to Recovery

In scouring the net for the latest news which affects the California construction industry, I recently came across a couple articles that I felt were quite encouraging in nature, indicating a likely increase in California construction work and construction projects as a whole.  The first snippet is a statistical analysis taken from www.dqnews.com and is [...]