Tag: Construction

October New Construction Spending Up 13% Year Over Year



  • Annually, the pace of multifamily spending rose 28% from the October 2014 estimate, and spending on single-family construction was 11% higher.
  • Construction spending in October was buoyed by a 0.8 percent rise in private spending, which touched its highest level since January 2008.
  • Construction spending has increased 13 percent in the past 12 months.
  • Single-family construction was up 1.6 percent to $226 billion while apartment construction rose 1.4 percent to $58 billion.
  • Construction spending has risen every month this year and is likely to support the economy in the final three months of the year as it deals with the strong dollar and energy cuts.


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Construction Spending Rose 1.0 Percent in October



  • Spending on residential construction increased by 1.0% to USD399.0 billion, and spending on non-residential construction rose by 0.6% to USD403.4 billion.
  • The Commerce Department said construction spending rose 1% to the highest level it since December 2007.
  • Together, total private residential spending was up 1.0%, suggesting better Q4 residential investment growth than we had previously expected.
  • Offsetting this, private nonresidential construction spending was a bit below our expectation in October and trimmed our estimate of structures investment.
  • The report said construction spending climbed 1.0 percent to an annual rate of $1.107 trillion in October from the revised September estimate of $1.097 trillion.


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Construction boss fired from The Apprentice Ι Construction Enquirer



  • Lord Sugar pointed his famous finger at “construction operations executive” Elle Stevenson this week as she was fired from reality TV show The Apprentice.
  • The teams were led by Stevenson and Brett “the Builder” Butler Smythe battling it out to represent construction.
  • The latest task was loosely based on construction as the two teams were charged with winning and carrying-out DIY jobs across London.
  • She was then fired from the boardroom within minutes of the result being revealed without having the chance for the traditional few minutes of bickering and pleading.
  • To share your stories email Grant Prior or Aaron Morby… always off the record


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Construction sector ‘in rude health’ as new business surges



  • THE UK’s construction sector remains in “rude health”, driven by the fastest rise in new business for a year, a report said.
  • Tim Moore, senior economist at Markit, said: “Another relatively buoyant construction PMI reading indicates that the sector remains in rude health.
  • But last month’s reading remains comfortably above 50 which indicates growth, and marks two-and-a-half years of sustained output growth across the sector.
  • The sector was driven by an uplift in commercial building, with housing and civil engineering work also expanding but at a slower rate.
  • The latest Markit/CIPS Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) survey for the sector showed that activity eased slightly to give a reading of 58.8 in October, although this was down from a seven-month high of 59.9 in September.


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Chinese contractor begins work on $137m new town in Panama



  • Photo: The ground-breaking ceremony, attended by the president of Panama (China Construction America)

  • The contractor, which is the American subsidiary of China State Construction Engineering Corporation, was awarded the scheme on 4 August.
  • The police intervened to keep the demonstrators from disrupting the ground-breaking ceremony.
  • The ground-breaking ceremony was attended by Juan Carlos Varela, the president of Panama.
  • The scheme will also host a campus for the University of Panama for West Panama.


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NT government paid $56m by Coalition ‘to dig a hole and fill it in’ at hospital site



  • Construction of Palmerston hospital, a project in the satellite city south of Darwin with $110m of federal funding, was supposed to have begun in 2014.
  • NT health minister John Elferink and federal MP Natasha Griggs were in attendance.
  • On Friday media were invited to attend the first pouring of concrete for a stairwell at the site to mark a construction milestone.
  • The stunt accusation is the latest in a series of controversies to have dogged the hospital.
  • A spokesman for Griggs said the senator was involved in securing federal funding, but did not wish to comment on how the site was managed.


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London’s garden bridge: the end of the road?



  • But Transport for London (TfL) and the Garden Bridge Trust have carried on regardless, egged on by powerful Bullingdon backers, mayor Boris Johnson and chancellor George Osborne.
  • The president of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association has described it as a “vanity project of a windswept garden on an unneeded bridge”, while leading bridge engineers have called it a “private garden platform pretending to be a bridge”.
  • The National Audit Office has been ordered to examine the “rationale” behind George Osborne’s pledge of £30m of Treasury funding for the bridge.
  • Their correspondence over funding the bridge was recently uncovered by the Architects’ Journal, in which Osborne spelled out his £30m grant and urged Johnson to “do the same”.
  • Opponents have objected to the £60m of public funding and the £3.5m annual maintenance costs, to the restricted access for bikes and to the murky procurement process, which saw Thomas Heatherwick appointed ahead of other experienced bridge designers.


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Construction sector returns to modest growth



  • THE construction sector returned to modest growth in June after a slowdown over the previous two months, official figures show.
  • Construction output in June was 2.6 per cent higher year-on-year, below economists’ forecasts of a 3.3 per cent rise but still the fastest growth since March.
  • The ONS added that the second quarter construction figure is higher than the flat output estimate it used to calculate gross domestic product (GDP) for the quarter last month.
  • But it added this small upward revision to construction did not point to any material revision to the ONS preliminary estimate of 0.7 per cent GDP growth in the second quarter of this year.
  • The ONS said: “Despite this increase the data for June 2015 continues a run of relatively weak monthly growth.”


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Construction adds 6000 jobs in July; unemployment falls to 8-year low



  • The US economy added 215,000 jobs in July, while the unemployment rate remained steady at 5.3%, meeting expectations.

  • Health care added 28,000 jobs in July and has added 436,000 jobs over the year.

  • Some commentators have asserted that the unemployment rate is a misleading measure because the post-crisis decline in the labor force reflects more than demographic factors.
  • Friday’s report means “it will be hard to justify delaying an initial Fed rate hike”, said Scott Anderson, chief economist of Bank of the West in San Francisco.
  • Economists had expected employment to climb by about 223,000 jobs, which would have matched the increase originally reported for the previous month.


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