The construction sector is a major component of the U.S. economy. During the past decade, construction was a prime beneficiary of low interest rates and the housing-led economic boom, but was also one of the largest casualties of the subsequent financial crisis. There are three major segments of the construction sector: residential, commercial, and industrial/heavy construction. The segments have unique market characteristics and are subject to cyclical economic forces, though in somewhat differing ways. This book outlines the structure of the construction industry and describes congressional initiatives that affect the sector.

The construction industry is a fascinating industry for businesses to operate in. In a general sense, the construction industry is a recession-proof industry. When the economy is booming, the construction industry becomes unusually active in tandem with the expansion plans of existing businesses. When the economy is not doing too well, the government steps in to stimulate economic activities through pump-priming the construction industry. Businesses in the construction industry are also complex in that these can be influenced by many stakeholders, both internal and external to the organisation. This book provides insights into the various strategic profiles of construction firms that can serve as a guide to gain a better understanding of the strategic intents of firms in contracting business. This helps to facilitate construction firms to improve their performance in terms of cost, time, quality, client value and profitability. This book is compulsory reading for senior managers of construction firms who are contemplating a review of their strategic intents in the industry, especially from the low cost to the differentiation or the hybrid segment.

Custom builder Jerry Householder can help you improve your estimating abilities and discover better ways to do a quantity takeoff, whether you prefer to use pen and paper or estimating software. He teams up with builder Emile Marchive III to show you: types of estimates and when to use them; tips and formulas for figuring quantities easily and accurately; procedures for integrating estimating with cost control, purchasing, and scheduling; how computer estimating can enhance your work; how establishing and maintaining a database facilitates your future estimates. This second edition provides a new, larger sample floor plan and new elevations, work sheets, checklists, a comprehensive glossary, plus a list of resources and recommended reading. It has all you need to quickly come up to speed with the concepts and terms necessary to ensure that your next estimate is easier to understand and more accurate. Bring your houses in under budget and make your construction process more efficient by developing complete and accurate estimates. The closer you come to completing a job within budget, the less likely you are to waste time and money-and that means more profit!

Practical Construction Accounting and Financial Management provides instructions, training, exercises, and examples of the fundamentals that successful construction contractors must master: the ability to capture, summarize, analyze, and forecast operation data to be better informed when making project and business decisions. Typically, a project manager is not involved with data entry but is a source of data collection. Often the project manager's lack of understanding of accounting systems creates a situation where the project manager's role in the data retrieval and entry is compromised. This compromise results in poor decisions being made by the project and company managers due to inaccurate and untimely data. This book provides current and future construction professionals with an awareness of fundamental accounting concepts and financial principles to successfully manage the finances of construction companies, including accurately pricing projects based on actual overhead and profit recovery needs, successfully controlling the cost to operate a construction company through the comparison between company budgets and actual financial statements, and proactively forecasting cash needs before falling into a potential cash trap that could force the company into bankruptcy.

The most complete and comprehensive source on financing real estate development--now revised, updated, and expanded

The Fourth Edition of the classic Construction Funding acquaints professionals and students alike with the critical tools needed for developing any successful real estate venture. Using a case example of an actual apartment development, Construction Funding walks the reader through each phase of the project, offering invaluable guidance on selecting markets, rating sites, choosing construction professionals, raising capital, understanding financing options, and mastering cash flow management.

It covers essential topics such as creating a pro forma, understanding an appraisal, and navigating a loan application. There are many new learning features and updates included, such as:

Joint ventures

Condominiums and condo conversions

Key terms and their definitions

Chapter summaries and learning objectives

End-of-chapter review questions

Complete reference section for additional information

Up-to-date costs and funding methods

Written by authors with broad experience in the construction and real estate industries, Construction Funding provides a concise, yet thorough guide for graduate and undergraduate students studying real estate. It also gives professional developers, planners, contractors, and other construction professionals an invaluable reference that broadens their understanding of every development project.

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. Protect your business from all types of risks--insure your projects with advice from the experts Here you'll find the answers to your questions about insurance, bonding, and risk management for all of your construction projects. This much-needed book helps you assess your requirements for insurance coverage, evaluate policies, find the fairest rates, obtain bonding, and manage risks professionally and confidently. Written by the foremsot experts at Ernst & Young LLP and Willis Corroon Construction, this authoritative guide gives you the information and methods you need to simplify and systematize your project insurance bonding, and risk management issues, and protect your business from all types of liabilities: You'll learn how to: establish your requirements for various types of insurance; determine how to get the insurance you need at the best rate; read and evaluate insurance contracts; secure bonds for both contractors and subcontractors; obtain workers compensation coverage; evaluate environmental issues; understand the role of sureties in litigation. Construction contractors and subcontractors, CPAs, law firms, and insurance and bonding agents will all welcome this comprehensive guide and the authoritative help it gives in ensuring successful outcomes for construction projects of every kind.

The construction of housing, commercial property and infrastructure projects - roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, airports - for both the private and public sectors is one of the biggest industries in the world. It contributes around 10 per cent of world GDP, employs 7 per cent of the global workforce, and consumes around 20 per cent of the world's energy. It is also a highly fragmented industry with very low profit margins and a high risk of failure for the many firms operating in its complex supply chain. Stephen Gruneberg and Noble Francis present an up-to-date analysis of how construction markets operate, how firms collaborate on projects, and how their business models work. They explore the many distinctive features of the economics of the industry, such as the use of cost-reduction rather than profit-maximizing behaviour, the processes of tendering and procurement, and the often cyclical nature of demand. Particular challenges for the industry, such as the frequency of disputes between firms and the low productivity of the sector, are shown to be the outcomes of a business model that tends to focus on the volatility of demand and managing risk at the expense of improving efficiency. As well as discussing industry-wide issues, the authors also examine how individual projects are costed. The book offers authoritative analysis and expert insight into the economics of a much misunderstood industry and is suitable for a range of courses in business schools and departments of architecture and the built environment.

Susan Eisenberg began her apprenticeship with Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1978, the year president Jimmy Carter set goals and timetables for the hiring of women on federally assisted construction projects and for the inclusion of women in apprenticeship programs. Eisenberg expected not only a challenging job and the camaraderie of a labor union but also the chance to be part of a historic transformation, social and economic, that would make the construction trades accessible to women. That transformation did not happen. In this book, full of the raw drama and humor found on a construction site, Eisenberg gracefully weaves the voices of thirty women who worked as carpenters, electricians, ironworkers, painters, and plumbers to examine why their numbers remained small. Speaking as if to a friend, women recall their decisions to enter the trades, their first days on the job, and their strategies to gain training and acceptance. They assess with thought, passion, and twenty years' perspective the affirmative action efforts. Eisenberg introduces this new edition with a preface that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed the same since the book's original publication. She ends with a discussion of the practices and policies that would be required to uproot gender barriers where they are deeply embedded in the organization and culture of the workplace.

This book sets out the innovative practices that have been introduced from other industries and shows how the construction industry has learnt from these.

Disasters threaten all parts of the world and they appear to be increasing in frequency, scale and intensity. Despite huge improvements in the emergency response, permanent reconstruction is often uncoordinated, inefficiently managed and slow to begin. International agencies are geared to an efficient response in terms of humanitarian relief, but they are not well versed in the requirements of long-term reconstruction, which is often constrained by lack of planning and poorly coordinated management.

The construction industry is typically engaged in a range of critical activities after a disaster, including provision of temporary shelter in the immediate aftermath and restoration of permanent shelter and public infrastructure once the immediate humanitarian needs have been attended to. "Post-Disaster Reconstruction of the Built Environment" identifies the challenges that face the industry and highlights best practice to enable the construction industry to address those problems which make an effective response to these unexpected events difficult. Written by an international team of experts, this book will help researchers and advanced students of construction understand the problems faced by communities and the construction industry when faced with a natural or man-made disaster, and identify the planning and management processes required by the industry to mount an effective response.

Quick, concise and direct, this pocketbook outlines the essentials that every architect needs to know about construction disputes - from tips on avoiding them in the first place and informally negotiating issues as they arise, to how to go about settling full-blown disputes more formally. The only easy-reference pocket book available on construction dispute management. Aimed at Part 3 students and practitioners working in small practices - a huge segment of the industry.

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007 (CDM Regulations 2007) is a revision of a major piece of legislation within the wide portfolio of construction-related legislation. It seeks to improve the long term health and safety performance of the UK construction industry, with ownership of health and safety proactively undertaken by the integrated project team.

Good design has always embraced health and safety issues and design teams remain essential players as well as key contributors and communicators in matters of health and safety management. Designers have a legal responsibility to ensure that their designs account for health and safety at all stages within the holistic envelope of construction.

"Design Risk Management: Contribution to Health and Safety" gives detailed guidance to construction practitioners with design responsibility on how to identify and manage health and safety risks, and on the design strategies to be followed. It seeks to focus on accountability with due emphasis on the minimisation of unnecessary bureaucracy and offers documentation trails that provide an insight to managing risk and not paperwork. Subsequently it offers a process by which designers can discharge their duties in compliance with the CDM Regulations.

Learn how Single-Task Construction Robots (STCRs) can improve productivity in the construction industry with this cross-disciplinary text. This third volume in The Cambridge Handbooks in Construction Robotics series discusses the STCRs employed on construction sites since the development of the approach in the 1980s, presents current applications, and highlights upcoming trends in the construction automation and robotics field. Two hundred different types of STCR are presented, from the simplest models comprising simple manipulators and mobile platforms, to those utilizing more sophisticated technologies such as aerial robotics, swarm robotics, exoskeletons, additive manufacturing technologies, self-assembling building structures, and humanoid robotics. Real-world case studies demonstrate the different application scenarios for each approach, and highlight the key implementation and management issues. With an easy-to-follow structure, and including hundreds of color illustrations, it provides an excellent toolkit for professional engineers, researchers, and students.

Questions of insurance arise in virtually all constructions cases. Providing a much-needed guide to the complex interface between insurance law and construction projects, this fully revised and updated second edition of Insurance Law for the Construction Industry will be of practical everyday use to both contentious and non-contentious lawyers. Written by an experienced team of practising solicitors from Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP, this work combines an overview of the relevant insurance law with the specific detail specialists will require. The book provides comprehensive coverage of the issues involving insurance encountered in the process of construction. It gives practical answers to all the problems likely to be encountered when negotiating construction contracts, insurance policies or insurance claims. Insurance Law for the Construction Industry is divided into four clear sections for ease of reference. It begins with an exposition of the principles of insurance law and then describes in detail the typical clauses found in insurance policies, the policies to be taken out by standard form construction contracts and how insurance is distributed and regulated. The many strands of insurance law are expertly drawn together to provide an excellent point of reference for all those working in this sector.

The Technology and Construction Court is one of the specialist jurisdictions of the High Court. It deals with a specialised workload involving construction industry and engineering disputes and, increasingly, information technology disputes. Its work often involves heavy factual cases, but also action in support of other dispute resolution methods such as arbitration, mediation, or adjudication under the Housing Grants, Construction, and Regeneration Act 1996. Technology and Construction Court :Practice and Procedure provides a unique and authoritative guide to this jurisdiction. It examines the day-to-day workings of the Court in detail, including: the relevant Civil Procedure Rules, the Pre-Action Protocol procedure, case management, alternative dispute resolution, the Court's support for arbitration, the stages in proceedings leading up to trial, the enforcement of adjudicators' decisions and costs. The book is fully up-to-date to take account of the second edition of the TCC Guide, which took effect on October 2005. The text offers step-by-step guide to the practice and procedures involved in the initiating and defending of proceedings, together with expert analysis and guidance on matters unique to the Court - such as Scott schedules, handling of expert witnesses, and enforcement of adjudication decisions. The authors are specialist practitioners with extensive experience of the Court from both sides of the legal profession. They have combined an authoritative analysis of the powers and constitution of the Court with detailed attention to the practical matters facing litigants, including timescales, costs, and the interaction of the Court's powers with alternative dispute resolution methods. There are useful appendices with extensive materials including a list of the current Judges, a list of District Registries, relevant legislation, rules of procedure, Practice Directions, and statutory instruments and various standard forms. This detailed and authoritative guide to the practice and procedure of this Court will be an essential reference work for all practitioners and in-house counsel involved with construction, engineering and IT disputes.

This carefully researched book covers trends in residential construction, commercial construction, real estate brokerage, property management, investment, finance, hotels, resorts, shopping centers, office buildings, mortgages, development, architecture, REITs and more. This reference tool includes thorough market analysis as well as our highly respected trends analysis. It contains thousands of contacts for business and industry leaders, industry associations, Internet sites and other resources. This book also includes statistical tables, an industry glossary and thorough indexes. The corporate profiles section of the book includes our proprietary, in-depth profiles of over 400 leading companies in all facets of real estate world wide, public and private. Sectors include construction, design, operations, management, development and the mortgage business. We cover trends in real estate and housing in emerging markets, including China and India. We also cover evolving concepts in the U.S., such as multi-use centers. Here you'll find complete profiles of the hot companies that are making news today, the largest, most successful corporations in the business. You'll find a complete overview, industry analysis and market research report in one superb, value-priced package.

This book provides a concise introduction to the theory and practice of construction planning for practitioners and students, providing knowledge, understanding and the appropriate tools and techniques in order to successfully manage and deliver construction projects in-line with clients' and stakeholders' requirements.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This impressive book challenges the orthodoxies that have dominated the construction management research (CMR) field for the past 50 years. Providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex and multi-faceted domain of construction, A Research Agenda for Construction Management sets out a range of alternative perspectives which problematise the axioms upon which much CMR knowledge is based and offers new directions for the research community to consider. Chapters range from exploring approaches to better understand the industry and its various functions, to discussing how alternative theoretical positions might be mobilised to shed new light on complex socio-economic activity. By challenging the ways in which construction is viewed, this Research Agenda subjects dominant research approaches and paradigms to critical scrutiny, ultimately encouraging future researchers to reflect on and adopt more creative and meaningful approaches to their work. By identifying new and emergent themes and exploring how these can be researched, this incisive Research Agenda will be of considerable interest to researchers and academics in the field of construction management research. Its thought-provoking chapters will also make this a fitting read for research-engaged construction practitioners.