How Tariffs Are AFFECTING CONSTRUCTION

But let's be honest, I am on the ground. I run a construction business. I don't really import anything. Why should I be concerned about tariffs? How does that affect me? Can you represent one of the largest construction organizations in in North America? Which sector you think people are chasing too aggressively and which sector people are not chasing and maybe they are missing out an opportunity? Clearly uh construction is not doing so well that most underrated construction sector right now. Let's move five years forward from now.

What would be your biggest worry for the construction sector? Is it Welcome to business of construction with Nathan. I am Nathan Ka and on this show we talk about the business side of construction. the things that actually affect the owners who are building, growing, buying, selling, and investing in construction companies. Today, we're going to look at something every construction owner is trying to figure out right now. What's actually happening in the construction economy? Some part of construction are booming, some are slowing down, labor is still tight, cost remains a concern.

And on the other side, you have data centers, public infrastructure, interest rates, tariffs, and a whole bunch of other factors pulling the industry in different directions. So rather than me trying to interpret all this noise, I brought in someone today who spends his career doing exactly that. My guest today is Ken Simson. He's a chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America. Ken has served as chief economist for AGC since 2001 and has more than 40 years of experience analyzing, advocating, and communicating about economic and tax issues.

He's also an adviser to the Census Bureau of Construction Data Re-engineering Initiative, a fellow and past president of the National Association of Business Economics. Through his media appearances, presentations, and weekly data digest, Ken has become one of the most important construction executive people turn to when they want to understand what the economic numbers actually mean. Ken, welcome to Business of Construction. It's great to have you on the show. Well, thank you, Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Yeah.

So, let me start with a question I think almost every construction owner is asking right now. How would you describe the construction economy today without simply calling it good or bad? It's much more complicated than that. Let me start with the broader economic picture because that ultimately affects what's going to happen with construction. The US economy has been remarkably resilient since the pandemic if not before. And uh right now, in spite of some doom and gloom earlier in the year, it appears we're far from recession.

In fact, business investment has been picking up. Consumers keep spending. Unemployment remains quite low. The one fly in the ointment is a high and rising inflation and with it interest rates. So these have very mixed effects on construction. As you mentioned, the strongest market by far is data center construction, but there are other pockets too that are quite significant. The US is uh looking at upgrading, modernizing and making more uh resilient, more resistant to climate change and specific events the entire electric grid.

So data centers play a role in that as part of the demand. But even apart from that, there is plenty going on in the power and energy markets. And then both the power and and data centers as well as some other end markets are creating demand for manufacturing plants particularly advanced plants that uh have a lot of automation and some have robotics doing very sophisticated development of semiconductor fabs of new drugs and soon defense contractors uh will be expanding their capacity if they're not already doing So, so those are the three strongest markets right now.

You also mentioned infrastructure. Certainly, the construction industry and the economy have gotten a big boost over the past five years from the infrastructure investment and jobs act. Other federal bills that provided funding uh to states and to businesses, but that money is tapering off or has actually run out in some cases. And then on the commercial side, let's say incomeroucing properties have been hit hard by the rise in both short-term and long-term interest rates, the higher costs of not just construction but of materials due in part to tariffs and to the Middle East conflicts and uh to uncertainty about how long each of those is going to stay in place.

So it is a very mixed story for all types of construction. Yeah. Can I would like to dissect those one by one, but before we get into that, tell me a little bit more about I read your article and you said today the construction market is low hire and low fire market. Tell me more. What do you mean by that? Well, one series that I look at closely each month is called the job openings and labor turnover survey. This follows the more widely known employment report that comes out on the first Friday of each month.

They're both produced by our Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the job openings and labor turnover survey or jolts has several series that indicate what companies are doing currently. Not just the total level of employment, but what's happening within the companies. So I look at a series called the hires rate. That is the number of people hired in the latest month as a percentage of the employment average over the month. And I look at that same month in previous years. The history series goes back to the end of 2000.

What we see is that uh the hires rate has remained very low for the last couple of years. That is that low hire environment that you hear about uh beyond construction throughout the private sector. Another aspect of that is the job openings rate. That's the number of open positions on the last business day of the month as a percent of the employment plus open positions on that day. And that has also been quite low although uh both series have picked up a little bit in in the last year.

Definitely that's these support the notion that firms are not hiring much currently. They're not even advertising jobs. But a third part of the report is the job separations. And this in turn is divided into layoffs and discharges, quits, and other kinds of separations. And layoffs and discharges are at a record low or very close to it compared the same month in the previous 25 years. So, this is a sign that firms while they aren't hiring right now, they're not laying off workers.

They're not afraid that they will have to shrink in order to stay in business. In fact, they expect business to pick up. And they know how hard it is to replace workers who have left, particularly the skilled ones. Yeah. And that's always been a challenge in the construction industry, right? Means it's it's a cyclical industry as we all know. And when there is a more demand of work, it's hard to find people to to to deliver that work, right? But what you're seeing in the economic data, so let's just talk about the people issue.

What are you seeing in the economic data? What does that mean for the future of construction industry? Is this a a structural change or is it a temporary change? And how should a person who owns a construction business listening to this show should interpret what you are seeing in in the data there? like how how do they navigate the situation? Well, good common good questions. The industry has struggled for a very long time to attract enough new workers. And this question gets this issue becomes more acute now as more workers are approaching either retirement age or at least the age at which they're not interested in doing heavy outdoor work in all seasons and weather.

Fortunately, we're starting to see an uptick in interest in students in in high schools, community colleges, career development teams in steering people toward trades, not just to four-year college degrees. And uh in fact the non-residential side of the construction industry that is non-residential building contractors especially trade contractors heavy and civil engineering firms they've been adding employees at a much faster rate in the last year or two than has the broader economy and that hiring has actually that total employment level has actually stepped up recently.

So, the latest figures for September showed that construction employment on the non-residential side was up 2.8% from a year ago compared to just about half a percent in the overall economy. The message for non-residential contractors is twofold. one, you're in a market that is growing, that is getting more workers, but you also have a lot of competition for those workers, particularly from the project types that I was just talking about. And uh we have been hearing from more and more contractors that they are seeing the skilled electricians, the plumbers, the HVAC people go off to data center projects even though they may be far away.

And so this is one of the challenges that other contractors are facing. Yeah. So that's very promising to hear what you just said that there is an uptake of new uh younger force coming into the construction sector. And as a matter of fact being on the ground myself that's what I am seeing with some of my friends kids when they go to school they are promoting actually that kids should get into these vocational programs versus going to you know higher education and so on because of the shortage of labor and what this career can offer to them as well.

So you it seems like you're seeing the same numbers in your data as well which is rolling in. But let's let's look at this this way. We talk to small business owners all the time, contractors, HVAC, plumbing and so on and there is a huge shift happening where the those guys are retiring and they are hoping their kids are going to take over their businesses at some point and those kids were not prepared to take over the businesses. So how do you think is going to affect the industry?

Is it going to when those people retire and they exit the business and many of them are literally shutting down the businesses because they cannot find a successor. So what is your take on it? Are we supplying now enough or are we bringing new fresh blood into the industry at the same pace as they're going to exit the boomers or we there's still going to be a mismatch and there's going to be challenge pulling those roles. I think it's some of each.

The association that I work for, Associated General Contractors of America, does a workforce survey every summer. We released the latest one just before Labor Day and what we found was that firms of all sizes, all regions, all specialties said that uh filling positions was a major challenge for them. That most types of jobs that they were looking to fill uh a hard time in most cases harder than a year ago. And this has been a chronic story for quite a few years now.

So this is not about to ease up. Even if we're starting to see some green shoots in terms of more teenagers picking career and technical education programs, more guidance counselors and others recommending this path instead of college. At the same time, I think companies are getting more aware of the need to make those jobs attractive. They realize that uh that people coming into the workforce now aren't just interested in salary and in accumulating the most hours of overtime they can get.

They do want time for their personal lives. And so companies are going to have to adapt their culture to fit that. At the same time, we're seeing uh more use of robotics, of AI, and of other advanced techniques to ease the burden on workers and to some extent replace the need for workers. will always need people with specific craft skills on job sites. But to the extent that uh these new tools can help them do their job more efficiently or just train them, get them up to speed uh to replace those workers with 30 years experience who are taking it out of the industry with them, I think there is hope that it will be a little easier to find replacement workers or to slot them into positions.

That's very insightful. Ken, so can you represent one of the largest construction organizations in in North America and with your lens and with your experience, let's say you were running a 1020 million contracting business, what would you be doing to attract the the the right talent to your firm? And part two of that question also is do you think immigration is a solution? I read in one of your articles you said a big part of construction industry is made of foreignb born talent.

Is that something which is needed to increase or what else would be a fix if you were running that business? Where would you look for talent and how would you retain the talent? You just mentioned one way to retain is not just the salary. make it make it worthwhile for them. But what are the give me two or three things which you would be doing if it was your business. Sure. Well, one thing that we're seeing right now is that wages are accelerating.

Uh national employment report that comes out on that first Friday of each month includes a series called average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory employees. That's a long mouthful to describe hourly wages for most craft workers and office workers who aren't supervisors. And the latest figures show that in the 12 months through August of this year, that average wage went up 5% in construction. That was actually an acceleration from a year ago. Meanwhile, in the rest of the economy, the rest of the private sector, that average wage went up 3.3% and it's been cooling off gradually.

So, one message that construction firms can use is that uh our pay is more than keeping up with the rate of inflation. The latest measure of the consumer price index was 3.4%. So, in the broader economy, wages are just barely sedaying level with the rate of price growth or not even. But in construction, you're actually going to be able to take home more money to spend. And construction has a tremendous career path upwards. So many of the owners and top executives that I talked to in construction firms started out as laborers or helpers or other entry-level jobs.

And that's not something you get if you're just coming out of high school and going to work in hospitality or food service or one of those lines. So I do think that those are powerful messages that are helping to draw more people into the industry. You also mentioned immigration and here construction. Yes. Uh the industry has been much more dependent on foreignb born workers than the broader economy. A study of uh the 2024 Census Bureau's American Community Survey found that 35% of construction trades workers were born elsewhere compared to 18% in the broader economy.

So really double the rate of dependency on foreignb born workers. That means that uh as immigration enforcement is tightened not just through uh deportations but through closing the southern border as we've seen in the last year and a half uh it becomes harder and harder to replace workers who leave whether voluntarily or otherwise. The association has been working with other business groups to try to create a pathway that uh companies can effectively use to demonstrate the need to look for workers elsewhere if there aren't enough American workers trained uh for the job they need.

But that's been a hard sell with this administration. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well said. You know you hit it on one number which we see all the time in terms of financial outcome of out of this trade and out of this industry and we I have dealt with multiple business owners who started right after house high school or even did not even complete a high school and enter into construction and they built multi-million dollar enterprises out of this industry. So there is a lot this industry can offer and you know people have to look at first of all people have to always look at what is it that they like to do in their lives but in terms of financial rewards this industry I have seen it firsthand that this industry can be extremely extremely lucrative and rewarding at the same time right means compare that to being going becoming a doctor where you have to go spend I don't know how many hundred thousand a few hundred thousand or a million dollars worth of education and wait for the opport opportunity cost for 10 years versus in the trades somebody can get started much sooner in their lives.

Let's shift gears Ken from here. So we both can I can we are seeing on the ground that industry is moving at two different speeds over here. I can talk about the Canadian market where the residential construction new home construction has slowed down significantly in the last couple years due to rising interest rates and uh we came out of COVID and so on and with the the slowing down the immigration as well. But on the other side, the data center construction is exploding.

The demand for HY contractors is exploding. What is your take on it? What is let's just break it down here. What is happening? Which way is the industry going? What's what's working and what's not? How is and what it's distorted like what is the future? Where are we heading? Okay. Well, let's start with the residential side since you mentioned that first. In the US also we've seen a big decline in single family home building and in multif family construction. There was a tremendous boom in building apartments after the pandemic and that uh peaked about three years ago.

It's been dropping very sharply. We may be close to the bottom of that in some markets, but I expect any recovery to be very modest in the next year and I think uh single family construction may remain in decline unfortunately as we see mortgage rates continue to rise. Just this week, Freddy Mack said that the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate had climbed to above 7% for the first time since early 2025. And that keeps pricing more firsttime home buyers out of the market.

It keeps people who got a mortgage at a much lower rate and they did get as low as below 3% a few years ago. Keeps them locked into the homes they have because they don't want to sacrifice that mortgage and take on a higher one even if they'd prefer to move to another home. So, I do think uh the residential side will continue to suffer over the next several months, perhaps a year or longer. On non-residential, you're absolutely right that data centers have had an incredible increase.

The figures the Census Bureau puts out first business day of each month show that uh from July of last year to July of this year, there was a 57% increase in spending on projects underway on data centers. And going back to the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic, data center construction has increased 70 sevenfold. Sevenfold. We've never seen that big an increase over a sustained period for any segment of the market. Going forward, I think we will still see growth at least for the next year, but it's going to taper off very sharply because the opposition to data centers has just grown almost about as fast as data center construction had grown in the previous six years.

Every week we're seeing more local jurisdictions, counties put in either moratoriums or other measures that slow down approvals of new data centers. For the moment, there's enough in the ground already approved that I think we will still see more spending, but as I said, at a much slower growth rate. There are bunch of categories beyond that. We can take those one by one if you'd like. All right. So, I've got two questions coming out of this gun here. So first is I don't work on data centers.

My business has nothing to do with data centers. We don't have an expertise. What does that mean for my business now? Where does my future lie? What should I be looking at? And the second question, it is just out of curiosity. Elon Musk wants to build data centers in space. What is your take on that? How realistic is that vision? And what would that do to the people who are focusing their energies on building data centers on this planet? Well, first we're all using data centers whether we uh are aware of it or not.

Anytime uh we're uh using a credit card or uh sharing medical records that uh our doctor or our the hospital or insurance provider uh uses, that information is flowing through a data center for ordering online or uh many other applications every day uh rely on the presence of data centers to process that kind of information. And as those demands have grown, let alone are using artificial intelligence to answer a question for us or solve a problem or help us in our work, the need for data centers is there.

AI has added a whole new level to that and more and more applications are showing up. So I do think the demand for having data centers the the giant number of servers in them that are processing uh those those queries those transactions and so forth that's not going to diminish the question is will we have enough capacity built installed to handle that so I do think that we'll find some I won't say middle ground but we will continue to see more capacity added here on Earth, probably in the US, but also the folks who are building and operating data centers.

They're looking anywhere on the planet. And as you mentioned, Elon Musk and some others, Google says that this week that they were planning to put up a a satellite to test the feasibility of data centers in space. Now, I should never underestimate Elon Musk. He's pulled off some amazing things in various categories, but it still seems to me that we're quite a ways off from turning to outer space to solve the land use issues and uh resource issues of data centers.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what they say, don't bid against don't bet against Elon Musk. So, I would be very careful in making any such assumptions there. Let's shift gears. Let's talk about public investment, public construction, infrastructure construction. How is that going on? What do you see of the future of that? And is is the investments going on in the public infrastructure overcompensating for what's seeing in the residential space? Yeah. Story really dates back to 2020 during the pandemic. That year, Congress started passing major legislation that continued in 2021 with the infrastructure jobs act.

Uh then in 2022, we also had uh the uh inflation reduction act and the chips and science act. All of these sent money either directly to construction or to state and local governments and kept them from the usual response to an economic slowdown or we had a brief recession in 2020 having to cut back because unlike the federal government with its everexpanding deficits, most nearly all state and local governments have to balance their budget each year. So typically when you have a a pullback in the economy, public spending on construction, which can be deferred more easily than cutting salaries for workers or laying them off or cutting benefits, construction suffers.

This time we saw public construction actually increasing steadily through this year. But we are starting to see more state and local governments run into fiscal distress. the federal money has either been allocated or it's been pulled back by the Trump administration. And while there are some strong parts of the economy both geographically and and markets, there are a lot of other areas that aren't doing well. For instance, my association AGC puts out rankings of 360 metro areas each month by change in construction employment.

And lately we've seen just half of them or a little less than half have been adding construction jobs. So in those other areas where employment is stable or more often declining uh clearly uh construction is not doing so well and quite often that's because the local economy and the local public spending has uh been flattened or actually declining and I think going forward this will continue to be the story. The federal government will keep running up bigger deficits. They'll be supporting more defense spending and the defense contractors will be uh putting more money into modernizing and adding plants at the state.

And we'll have to see about highway spending that has a category of its own in terms of the five-year bill that Congress we hope will approve by December when they come back after the election. But at the state and local level where most public spending happens, I do expect a slowdown overall with some exceptions among states that are doing well. Right. Right. Can people have tendency to chase a hot stock or a hot construction sector or a hot market sector? With your experience, which sector you think people are chasing too aggressively which they should not be and which sector people are not chasing and maybe they are missing out an opportunity.

Well, I've survived as long as I have by not advising people about any type of investment. Certainly, I haven't been a star on that. But I will stick to what I think the segments of construction that should be doing better in the next year or two and ones that may be pulling back. Let me start on the negative side. Uh the one that I'm most concerned about at this point of having a negative change is higher ed. This has been a significant niche for many companies.

And yet in the last year we've seen a growing number of stories about small private colleges that are closing their doors, large state universities or other that are eliminating entire departments and reducing faculty. We know that the administration has blocked many students from getting visas or has terminated the visas of students, faculty and researchers who are here. So for all of these reasons, I think many higher education institutions will no longer have either the need or the money to expand to build new dorms and classrooms and laboratories.

On the positive side, we have a uh economy where not only is there still demand for data centers, but increasingly for niches within manufacturing, certainly in health care. I think that there will be a changeover from spending on big hospitals, research hospitals that some of the the more famous medical centers. They're always going to be building, but we're seeing a lot of consolidation among small and community hospitals. Instead, more and more care is being delivered through a grabag of specialized facilities, whether it's a cosmetic surgery or dental or vision, whether it's testing, diagnosis, treatment for specific conditions outside of the hospital setting, long-term care, hospices.

All of these are going to be growth markets have started to be for uh healthc care construction. Actually that makes a lot of sense with the with the aging population. Absolutely. The money has to pour into that. Ken, I think we can both agree that construction market or real estate market is never national. It's always regional. So if I am a $10 million contractor, revenue contractor right now and I'm looking to expand my business, which regions should I be looking at which are being the regions which have been overlooked?

Where should I be looking to expand my business? Well, it's a complicated question. We look every month at uh the change in construction employment by state as well as uh by metro area. We rank all of the states in the District of Columbia. And what I've been seeing through this year is that uh the wet the west coast states, many of the northeast states, and more recently some of states in the southeast have actually had a decline in construction employment. The strongest growth has been across a broad swath of the midsection of the country, both east, east to west, and north to south.

But will that last? I think that the longer term trend will continue to be population moving into the south. Not so much Florida, which is running into more and more environmental and insurance challenges, but uh the Carolinas uh last year South Carolina have the highest percentage growth rate in population of any state and uh North Carolina has been uh close behind for a number of years. So, uh, that looks like a very strong area. I think the Northeast, uh, because of aging population, colder climate, more regulation, more taxes in general, will continue to be a slower growth area.

And yet, there are always notable exceptions. Just recently, Micron began what may be a hundred billion dollar fabrication complex outside of Syracuse, New York. So even within states that are slow growing or having a decline in population or in construction employment there may be localities and that's why I feel it's important to look at those 360 metro areas as well as state by state. Another example is in California, which the larger metros generally have been having some of the biggest declines in construction employment.

But because of AI leading to so much more demand for workers in the Silicon Valley area, the San Jose market has had a significant increase in construction employment. So, and then looking at Texas, Houston consistently is adding the most workers on a year-over-year basis, but there are other parts of Texas that have been struggling. So, I think I've dodged your question as well as I could. No, you gave us the you gave us very good insights, right? Because it's again it's regional.

You can't paint the everything with the same paintbrush. Can let's move five years forward from now. What would be your biggest worry for the construction sector? Is it insufficient demand or is it insufficient labor? And give me your reasons why. Sure. Well, it's always a challenge for me to look beyond. One day my crystal ball fogs up very quickly when I start looking farther out. Five years certainly a challenge. And uh if you just go back 6 and 1/2 years, we've seen an incredible number of unexpected challenges from COVID to the Ukraine Russia war to what's happened this year in the Middle East.

All of these and uh with inside that period, we've also had the tariffs. We've had the immigration enforcement. Maybe those things weren't totally unexpected, but they have certainly caused a lot of turmoil in construction and among the demand for different types of construction as well as the incredible growth in AI and in data centers. So, uh looking five years out, I think we will still see a combination of firms struggling to fill key positions. We are seeing more and more workers hit that point where uh they are going to hang up their hard hat for good.

We have starting 18 years ago was the peak in births in this country and it's declined steadily ever since. So that has a negative implication not just for college enrollment but for the prospective number of people of American-born people entering the workforce and and for construction to bid for them. a layer on that that shutdown of immigration, the increase in deportation or threats of it and an industry that is so dependent on foreign workers as construction is that will add further to the challenge.

So I think finding enough workers will probably continue to be the number one headache for most construction firms. On the demand side, uh we've had this now long period of low housing construction, declining housing, whether apartments or single family homes that will be reversing within 5 years. So residential I think will come back. I can't say how soon. It really depends on how steep interest rates are going to get. But I do think that within 5 years, the residential side will be growing again.

But that doesn't mean that we'll come back to a strong market for office or for retail. Those are going to have very selective demand going forward as uh we've learned to order more and more goods online. Uh we go to offices less and less often. So definitely a changed picture from uh where we are today. All right. Ken, you wrote about tariffs, but let's be honest. I am on the ground. I run a construction business. I don't really import anything. Why should I be concerned about tariffs?

How does that affect me? Tariffs, you're right, don't affect consumers as directly as they do construction? Because everything in construction is a material. And the tariffs are only hitting materials, not services. Consumers are buying a lot more services than they are materials. Yes, we buy a washing machine or a refrigerator every several years, hopefully not too often. And those may be hit by the tariffs on steel cont copper content and so forth. But for construction, it's an everyday challenge. They're either buying foreignade materials directly, equipment and materials, not not directly but through an importer probably, or they're buying from a domestic producer that is well aware of what those tariffs are doing to the cost of the imports they compete with.

So the domestic prices have been rising almost in tandem uh with the tariffs. And then you have the volatility. The tariffs keep changing. A year ago, after we'd had five months of tariffs, um people thought, okay, well, it's been painful, but now at least they're established. They're going to stay the same. Not true. We continue to see changes. As you're aware from Canada, there's kind of a a tit fortat battle going on currently between President Trump and your prime minister about what kinds of tariffs should be on each country.

And in fact, some go on and come off quite rapidly. We had a tariff on Canadian cement for about three weeks and now it's been suspended. Uh the the cost of lumber keeps changing as those anti-dumping and counterveailing duties get adjusted. So this uncertainty makes it very hard for contractors to price projects and uh to get owners to agree to price adjustments. And I think that will continue to be a drag, not just from the contractor's side, but owners who need to know what the cost of their inputs will be, what retaliation they may face from consumers who had been coming across the border from Canada and now staying away, staying away from American products showing up in Canadian shelves.

Those things definitely affect decisions by owners as to whether to build uh new facilities, update or put the brakes on. Right. Right. Can uh I wish we had more time to pick up on your brains and learn from your, you know, decades and decades of experience, but we always like to end the show on some fun part and we like to do some rapid fire round over here. We would like to ask you some questions and you don't have to think about it.

Just just tell us what comes to your mind quickly. Right. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. One construction number that you watch closely. Absolutely. The employment figure that I think is the best indication of whether construction overall is growing or struggling. Most underrated construction sector right now. I think specialty healthcare things outside of the hospital setting. Biggest cost risk for contractors certainly tariffs. Uh the uncertainty that they impose on what your costs will be the next time you order something. Biggest labor risk.

Will you be able to outbid other firms for those specialized skills that you need? One sector you expect to strengthen over the next 5 years. I certainly think that we're going to see strong growth in some parts of manufacturing. probably not the automotive side, but very much plants for defense contractors, more pharmaceutical and and biotech uh plants and probably manufacturing to support the power industry and perhaps also data centers and related facilities. One sector you expect to remain weak. Weak? Well, I think for the next year or longer, housing is going to be weak.

I think for several years out uh the office market will remain weak. One mistake business owners make when they read the economic data. They think that the consumer price index tells them what's happening to the cost of construction. In fact, there's a producer price index for inputs to new non-residential construction. That's a weighted average of the cost of all materials and some services, notably trucking services that are used non-residential construction. And from August of last year to August of this year, that index went up 8.9%.

That was more than double the increase in the consumer price index. So owners are regularly surprised or pretend to be surprised when a bid comes in much higher than they thought it would. Ken, this has been uh a fantastic conversation. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that construction sector isn't just one market. There are different markets, different sectors, different geographies all happening at the same time. And for the challenge for the owner is not knowing whether the economy is good or bad.

It is what you know is which part of the economy you should actually be operating in uh and what those numbers really mean for your business. Can where can people follow your work and get your data digest? Well, I do recommend that anybody who's involved in US Construction get involved with the local chapter of Associated General Contractors of America. We have 87 state and local chapters and uh you can find them on the homepage of ag.org. I write a weekly summary of economic news as you heard uh specific to construction and you can get that by emailing me at ken simonsson si m o n ss o nagc.org or uh look for the store at ac.org.

So uh thanks for the opportunity. Well, and thank you again for joining me. And to everyone watching or listening, if you got value from this conversation, subscribe to Business of Construction with Nithan. We talk with people who are actually building, buying, selling, investing, and advising construction businesses. And if you know a construction owner who needs to hear this conversation, send this episode to them. I am Nathan Kenna. Thanks for watching Business of Construction. I will see you on the next