Strict college professors like to shake up their students on the first day of class by telling them, “Look to your left, look to your right. One of you will not be here at the end of the year.” That same scenario applies to the construction industry this year. When the market meltdown began last fall, you could have taken a group of construction executives and told them, “Look to your left, look to your right. One of your firms won’t be here in a year.”
The industry is coming up on the first anniversary of the 2008 stock-market crash that reflected a construction market already staggering from the collapse of the bloated homebuilding market, a disintegrating financial sector that froze or terminated projects and the complete loss of public confidence in national economies in the U.S. and abroad.