Monday, December 31, 2007

More Good Economic News for Landscape Architects

Piggy backing on my last post about the increasing demand for landscape architects, Landscape Architecture and Specifier News published another industry survey. In fact it was hard to tell if they were not the same survey. I could not find any indication if it was. Regardless, it had a lot more information than the ASLA press release. LASN reported forty three percent of firms surveyed a ten percent or more increase in 2007 revenues as of the third quarter. Fifty-two percent of the firms anticipated a better year next year. This is good news. I hope they are right. LASN predicted growth in all listed non-residential sectors. This included an increase of 12.5% for Hotels in the Commercial/Industrial Sector and 9.8% increase in Public Safety within the Institutional Sector. (link to entire list). I found it surprising that LASN was much more optimistic than the consensus figures between McGraw-Hill Construction, Global Insight, Portland Cement Association, Moody's, FMI, and Reed Business. Collectively, they predicted a 5.2% increase in Industrial facilities and a 5% increase in healthcare facilities as their top 2 sectors. They predicted a net decrease in retail by -0.9%. I would lean toward these more conservative figures. I may be pessimistic but the current credit crunch has to be a big factor. On the flip side, I was talking to an architect recently and they said many of their clients had thought they could wait out the construction price increases before making commitments, but are now realizing the high prices are here to stay, so they are now moving forward on projects. A recent report from Reed Construction Data confirms that construction cost have slowed, but rose 1.4% in November. Of course, all of this talk about the economic outlook is about the US market. For those working abroad, particularly in red hot China, things may look much different.

Labels: , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home