When unemployment rears its ugly, stinking face, you end up doing things that one who is gainfully employed may not normally do. Some of this you may share with others, and some of this you may not. I'm not talking about eating Ramen noodles three times a day or going on a shopping spree at Goodwill. Rather, I'm talking about looking at the industry in which you work in a way that you otherwise may not when you are in the day-to-day grind of details, deadlines, and workload.One example of this slightly abnormal behavior came about because I was curious about the economic state of the construction industry and I decided to look on the AIA (American Institute of Architects) website for any clues about where and when the industry may be moving. This in and of itself wouldn't be consider abnormal, but plotting the non-residential percentages for 2009 and 2010 in an Excel spreadsheet could be (see above). I wouldn't say the results were encouraging other than the fact that construction spending will decrease at a slower rate in 2010 than 2009 (according to the AIA). And in the amusement sector of the construction industry, spending is projected to increase 1% in 2010. Woo-hoo! I guess high unemployment creates a need for more roller coasters and wave pools.
The AIA, in my opinion, does a fantastic job of tracking the economics of construc
tion. They provide independent research that I have found to be far superior to the Association of General Contractors. It seems to me that the architects tend to have their you know what together a bit more than contractors. I'm sure there are some that will disagree with me, but from my experience, I can safely say that it has been the case.I found myself left with three question after my little trip down the road of self-proclaimed economic analysis:
1. Is the non-residential construction spending projected by the AIA good news or bad?
2. Do architects ride the intellectural high-horse when compared to contractors?
3. If the answer to question 2 is yes, why?
Perhaps we can leave this an an open ended discussion for the illustrious Constructonomics readership to hash out. I'm sure we can come to some consensus on this one.
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John,
ReplyDeleteThe US Census keeps track of construction spending in the US. Its a good source of historical data. There has been a lot of talk about AIA's billing index. And while the architectural billings today should give you an outlook of construction activity later, not everything that is designed is built. In addition, predicting the future is not an exact science.
What I'm saying is that it would be interesting to see how the AIA billings in previous years matched up to the actual construction data. It would be interesting to see how accurate they have been predicting construction activity two years out.
Thanks for the insight. Perhaps a comparison of AIA predictions vs. US Census actual figures could be the subject of an upcoming blog posting.
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