Construction spending is down among the top corporate owners in the U.S. as most admit that it is becoming more difficult to justify capital investment in the wake of a recession. Increasingly, owners are looking to the construction industry not just to build their projects, but to find innovative new approaches that cut costs and speed the process. And some owners are not happy with the industrys response.
The private-sector construction recession in the past few years has been significant. The construction-in-progress figure for this years ENR Top 425 Owners dropped 14.7%, based on 2002 numbers, from last years list. In addition, the U.S. Commerce Dept.s construction put-in-place figures fell sharply in industrial and private-sector nonresidential building categories in 2002 (see charts below).