At the end of 2008, when the nation’s financial system seemed on the verge of a complete meltdown, the outlook for 2009 construction activity certainly was not a rosy picture.
In the 2009 Outlook that Southeast Construction published in January, McGraw-Hill Construction economists Robert Murray and Jennifer Coskren used phrases like “clearly in retrenchment,” “this bodes particularly poorly” and “less than upbeat” to describe what awaited contractors in the then-coming year.