The new year will likely bring considerably more pain to contractors and designers working in the Southeast Construction region, especially as firms focused on a still-declining commercial sector work off their thinning backlogs. Companies fortunate enough to be working in publicly funded markets should start to see some improvement in 2010, however.
That’s the opinion of McGraw-Hill Construction, publisher of Southeast Construction, in its forecast for the four-state region of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The company expects the Southeast region to experience a 10% improvement in the overall value of new contracts in 2010, for a cumulative total construction figure of $66.4 billion in project starts. That compares to the $60.2 billion the company estimates for 2009.