During the current coronavirus threat, information is difficult to get. And since the situation is changing so quickly, what we do get is often out of date.
Contractors, engineers, architects and manufacturers weigh in our how their businesses are doing during the coronavirus threat
Metal Construction News has conducted three surveys of its audience over the last month, tracking changing attitudes and industry conditions. We want to know how companies are coping and what they expect to happen.
The first survey was conducted from March 30 through April 2. The second was conducted from April 13 through April 16, and the final survey ran May 11 through May 14.
We conducted the second survey from Monday, April 13 through Thursday, April 16, and 193 people responded. We broke our report into four areas:
- Audience characteristics
- Overall attitude
- Revenue changes
- Project and employee changes
The audience demographics are below. Follow links in the sidebar to see the other sections as well as the reports on other surveys.
We plan to do this survey regularly. If you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please contact Paul Deffenbaugh, editorial director, pdeffenbaugh@moderntrade.com
Audience Demographics
(Note: Click on plus sign to enlarge images.)
As with the first survey, we had a strong number of contractors, manufacturers and architects responding. The make up of the contractors shifted slightly from heavily general contractors and metal building contractors to more roofing contractors and metal erectors.
Compared to the survey conducted at the end of March, the geographic distribution of respondents was much more even. Contractors from the East were more highly represented (23.8% compared to 15.5%), while those from the South were slightly less represented (37.2% to 31.6%).
We proposed in our first survey analysis that the uneven participation of respondents from the East may have been due to the high concentration of Covid-19 cases on the Eastern Seaboard. The results of this survey would suggest that was not the reason for the uneven concentration since the East is evenly represented. One other possible explanation is that the companies in the East have hit more of a routine and have time to participate in surveys such as this.
As should be expected, the distribution of project types done by our respondents held almost identically compared to the first survey. Commercial projects led the way at 92.7% with industrial following at 64.6%. Those numbers are not significantly different from the previous survey.
More than a third of the work done by respondents is new construction with slightly less than a third being remodel/retrofit work. There was no change in this from the previous survey.
