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Construction slows due to high prices and oversupply
Page 40
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8y Louise Cote A SURVEY BY the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has highlighted a dramatic slowing of the private housebuilding and private commercial building markets, with weakening confidence across the sector. The RICS says builders' workloads have fallen in the first quarter of 2008 to a level unseen since 1996.
RICS senior economist David Stubbs says: "Private commercial workload growth has slowed rapidly as the downturn in commercial property prices and the looming oversupply force developers to shelve plans for future construction. We think it is likely that the combination of reduced building activity in private housing and private commercial sectors will act as a major drag on the construction industry over the balance of this year." However, a Plimsoll Publishing report on the construction market identifies 940 of the top 2,000 companies that will push aggressively to grab market share and take advantage of the profitable firms in construction that are becoming good acquisition targets.
There are also 435 companies in the top 2,000 that are likely to be pushed out of the market altogether as conditions worsen.
So now is a good time for those transport companies serving the construction industry to look hard at the financial health of their customers and ask themselves where their clients are likely to be in 12 months.