Stimulus or Not, Public Construction is Up

Of late there have been a number of stories bemoaning the delay in getting stimulus funds to work in the regional markets. Some of this criticism is probably valid, and much is tied to the fact that the money was to be flowing through state coffers, and many states are like PA right now: frozen in budget battles. The reality is that no matter the direct impact of ARRA funding today, the spending of public money on construction has skyrocketed compared to recent years in western PA.

Within the past few weeks alone, big contracts were let for school construction in Bethel Park ($60 million, with Mascaro low on the general) and Upper St. Clair ($20 million plus each to Gurtner and Mucci). The state’s prison expansion program is in full bloom. Letters of intent were issued on 3 of the smaller expansions. The SCI Pine Grove job went to G. M. McCrossin, Cambridge Springs went to PJ Dick and Wohlsen got the Coal Twp. job in Northumberland Co. Each went for between $11-12 million. The proposals have apparently been rejected on $200 million Rockview expansion (which will re-bid) and the $400 million Graterford job is now out.

Federal spending is up significantly in the broader region as well. More than $25 million is getting underway or is out to bid at VA hospitals in Pittsburgh, Butler or Altoona. In northern WV, another $100 million expansion of the federal prison in Hazeltine has just bid; the $65 million Camp Dawson Interagency Training Center is out to bid in Kingwood; the first phase of a $170 million FBI research center in Clarksburg bids in early October, when the bid packages for a $45 million IRS computer center in Kearneysville are to be out.

In the infrastructure sector, PA will have contracted roughly double the annual highway budget by Labor Day, including a $100 million plus Turnpike section that Jos. B. Fay is doing between Hampton and Cranberry, plus a couple of $25 million bridge jobs that will be done by Trumbull and Swank.

With commercial market declining and financing still tight, government spending for construction was to be the bright spot of the market in 2009 and 2010. Media complaints about stimulus aren’t reflecting the public market here at least.

City of Pittsburgh Leads Housing Permits But New Housing and Commercial Slowing

Single family housing starts fell more than 39% compared to last year during the first half of 2009. “The buyers’ response to tough market conditions has been strong and builders have responded by keeping new inventory off the street,” said Jeff Burd, President of Tall Timber Group. “It was pretty obvious from the activity levels month to month that much of the slowdown was early in the year, when the fear from last fall’s financial panic was still palpable; however, the spring permits don’t indicate much easing of the uncertainty.”

 During the January through June period 697 permits were issued for single-family detached units, down 39.4% from the same period last year. Attached units also declined, with 614 units started compared to 641 during the first half of 2008.  The overall housing construction market was down 26.8%. 

 “There really isn’t anything upbeat in this market, but the hopeful signs are that the decline has slowed significantly from the first to second quarter,” says Burd.  “And, the one positive trend continues to be the solid demand for living in the city, as Pittsburgh proper lead the region in single-family permits, a first since we began covering the area in 1994.” 

 Non-residential construction was down almost 18% from last year, but contracting volume was up over 75% from the first quarter of 2009.  Contracting during January-June was $1.3 billion, down from $1.58 billion in 2008.  “The pace of bidding is better than you might expect for a recession,” says Burd.  “The pipeline of projects being proposed is improving, with architects and engineers seeing some uptick in the number of proposal requests, however, the pressure on contractors to build backlogs is starting to show in bids.”

 Reduced global demand has dampened the plans for almost all of the big projects slated to start in 2009, and Tall Timber has modified it forecast for non-residential construction for 2009 to $2.4 billion. “Unless the bigger economy begins to grow sooner than it appears it will, I’m not hearing anything to suggest that AK Steel or Allegheny Ludlum will begin until next year” noted Burd. The other large industrial project, USS Clairton Works, has already been shelved.

 The totals listed below represent the number of new housing units for which building permits were issued, excluding mobile homes and elderly care complexes.  The top areas were:

Topmuni2009-2

Housing Drops to Record Low, Commercial Contracting Slowing

The carryover of the fourth quarter consumer panic nationally translated into much cooler demand for new housing in the first quarter of 2009, with fewer than 500 total units permitted. New construction averaged less than 90 new single family units a month in the first quarter. That is an unprecedented low volume since 1994, and probably those levels haven’t been seen since the early 1980’s.

During the January through March period 254 permits were issued for single-family detached units, down 47.1% from the same period last year. Attached units also declined, with 241 units started compared to 317 during the first quarter of 2008. The overall housing construction market was down 37.9%.

1st-qtr-housingMarch permits were about twice January and February numbers but there isn’t a lot of cheer from that. Although Pittsburgh’s economy appears to be outpacing the national conditions, the uncertainty translated to almost no demand in the first couple of months. Because there are so few spec builders in the region, slow demand means slow starts. Tall Timber Group is forecasting a pickup throughout the remainder of 2009, but expects permits for new construction will remain well below normal levels until mid-2010 or later.

Non-residential construction was down almost 20% from last year, but contracting volume was higher than expected, especially after February 1. Contracting during January-March was $471.5 million, down from $585 million in 2008. Most contractors have had plenty to bid since February 1, but it’s too early to say if that’s a return to a higher pace or just the lag from the slowdown of the previous three or four months. The pipeline still looks like owners and developers expect to start what was in planning last year, just a little later than expected.

Tall Timber still forecasts more than $3 billion in construction for 2009, even with the deferment of the USS Clairton project, but cautions that the forecast still includes a handful of projects totaling $1.5 billion. Competition for smaller to medium size projects is more intense, and I’m still not sure that owners aren’t bidding projects just to see how much prices have dropped. That sort of ‘test-drive’ mentality will hurt if the bids get shelved anyway.

The totals listed below represent the number of new housing units for which building permits were issued, excluding mobile homes and elderly care complexes. The top areas were:

topmuni2009-1

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

The local construction economy has been surprisingly resilient since Feb. 1, particularly in light of the fact that the boom of the last few years has been driven by private investment. This is the source of development that has run for the sidelines in most of the nation.

In western PA estimating for future construction is not at the levels it has been in recent spring seasons, but the activity level is climbing. This is a very good short-term sign, since the higher activity in Feb/March could have been simply a Band-Aid carried over from the fourth quarter void. What’s out to bid now is a broad-based spectrum of projects. Due in the next couple of weeks are a $30 million fit-out for K & L Gates downtown, a $30 million science building at St. Vincent’s in Latrobe, the $99 million Bethel Park High School, and a couple of dozen $5-10 million dollar projects, ranging from office/warehouses to schools/colleges to retail (believe it or not).

None of this is a reflection of any stimulus spending. For those looking to see how the ARRA investments will flow in the region, watch for an increase in projects at the SSHE campuses (Slippery Rock, IUP, Cal, etc), and some assistance to larger private developments that can justify adi for infrastructure. For direct stimulus spending it will still be another quarter at least until PennDOT or the counties or state agencies can push ‘shovel ready’ work out to bid.

A couple of larger development projects are still moving: the Flabeg plant in Clinton Business Park (180,000 SF) is getting ready to start, Horizon Properties is contracting a 100,000 SF office in Southpointe II, a 4-story office at Southside Works (formerly slated for Dick Corp.) is heating back up, and Westinghouse has asked for developer proposals for another 165,000 SF in Cranberry, not scheduled as part of their Cranberry Woods campus.

The cloud to go with the silver lining is the word that two of the big projects in the region have gone on hold temporarily. The Clairton Coke Works expansion has been stopped, as worldwide steel demand has plummeted, causing layoffs in the existing plant. There are some rumors of callbacks in April, but nothing to substantiate those as anything but hope. Likewise, the deterioration of the global economy has dampened the specialty steel market, which has caused a delay in plans to build the $1.4 billion Allegheny Ludlum plant in Brackenridge. Both projects could be on the front burner again by summer, but continued soft conditions may also put the work on the shelf until 2010 or later. That scenario will have a significant impact on available labor within one quarter.

That bad news aside, contracting for the first quarter appears to be heading for $500 million or so, a volume that was unespected just 60 days ago. It will be June 30 before we can judge if this is a spring fling or an indication that commercial real estate isn’t getting any worse here.

Better News from Banking

Feel completely free to consider this a reach, but for about a week there has been little cracks in the storm clouds over the financial system. None of these bits of good news signals any reversal in course but sometimes it’s good just to assemble the little pieces in one place:

  • Citibank circulated an internal memo the week of March 9 that told employees that the bank was profitable during the first two months of 2009. The same has been true of Bank of America and J. P. Morgan/Chase.
  • International bank HSBC announced that it will not need bailout money offered by the British government.
  • Borrowing by US banks from the Federal Reserve fell below $20 billion last week for the first time since before the Lehman Brothers panic in September.

Uber-investor Warren Buffett responded in a CNBC interview about the ‘financial Pearl Harbor’ (his words) that he wasn’t as concerned about the banks because the current market dynamics (low borrowing costs, high spreads) would allow banks to ‘earn their way out’ of trouble. His assessment doesn’t make any future event gold, but after 78 years and 50+ billion dollars, he’s right some of the time.

The lending institutions have been stuck in neutral for almost six months (although not so many of the regional banks in western PA), and have been losing money for a year. While the Fed’s cuts of overnight rates have made it almost painless to borrow money from each other, the benefits of holding cash, with short-term Treasuries almost worthless, are fading fast. This is especially true when you factor in the enormous success that banks have had attracting deposits since the fall. Saving rates are up, net household debt has actually been reduced, and consumers are accepting the attractive CD rates most banks have offered to bring in deposits.

However, the math is not in favor of the banks for very long. Paying out 2% to 4% on teaser CD’s when the return on 6-month Treasury bills is almost zero will result in further bank operating losses, unless the banks start making loans. With $4 trillion (or $9 trillion depending on whose numbers you use) in cash on the sidelines, putting the money to work can create the results that allow banks to earn their way out of trouble like Buffett suggests.

Now the issue is, who wants to borrow money right now?

Focus on the Assets, Mr. Obama

Nearly six months after the onset of the hysteria that gripped the financial markets this past fall, we can begin to look more clearly at the wreckage left behind when a half dozen of the world’s financial institutions went belly up within a couple of weeks. Through TARP and TALF and ARRA (aka the Stimulus) and a whole bunch of money used to keep AIG afloat, the federal government has gained a disproportionate amount of ownership in the formerly free market. What would be a shame is if out of all this investment, the assets that started all the problems – residential mortgages – didn’t end up in the government’s hands to pay back the investment.

TARP, in case you don’t remember, stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program. The benefit of this extraordinary government intervention in the free market was supposed to be the removal of the so-called ‘toxic assets’ from the balance sheets of the banks. One of the more persuasive arguments made at the time of the debate over TARP was that Japan had failed to provide such relief in the late 1990’s and thus prolonged their credit problem into the ‘lost decade’ recession.

The asset relief was to begin the recovery of the banks’ stability and presage more normalized lending. What Fed Chair Bernanke discovered almost immediately was that the unwinding of the balance sheets would delay action with TARP for six months, time he didn’t feel the economy had. So his solution was to infuse capital the way the markets do it, by equity investing, in this case buying preferred stock. But the long term solution must still be getting the bad assets off bank balance sheets.

Mortgage backed securities (MBS) are kind of the poster child for this financial crisis. The common wisdom on the problem with MBS is that the underlying assets, residential mortgages, are so under water because of the derivative reselling of bad loans on houses whose value is plummeting. This, however, is not actually accurate. Let’s look at the problem from both sides: plummeting values and inability to pay.

Both sides of the problem are somewhat related, in that the magnitude of the problem is being overstated compared to the number of loans actually in default. At last report, the delinquency rates on residential mortgages was climbing, but the number of loans that were current was still above 91%.  That level of regular repayment reinforces the argument that declining values don’t cause defaults for most homeowners. The recession is absolutely having a negative impact on the number of people who can no longer make their house payments. That’s why foreclosures are up, and why the number of delinquent mortgages climbed to historically high levels at more than 8%. If delinquent loans make up 10% of the total pool (and that’s possible if recovery stretches out another year or more), that level would be extremely high and rare.

Why these ratios are important is that they contrast sharply with the discounts at which most of the MBS traded hands last fall. When Lehman Brothers was going under, it was forced to sell securities as low as 18 cents on the dollar to meet unprecedented redemption requests. That may have been the low water mark, but even conservative estimates of the diluted value of the MBS market are at 25% to 30%, meaning that the securities are being discounted by a factor or six or seven times the actual default rate. The perception is that the sub-prime mortgages (which are 90% current at the moment) are failing and the securities based on them are worthless. The reality is that they are only worth less than at their peak, not worthless.

If the Treasury can see fit to make its acquisitions be of existing and new MBS product, it could actually initiate an increase, maybe a dramatic one, in the value of those securities. This would have an immediate positive impact on bank balance sheets, as well as on shareholder values. Even if the federal intervention did not goose the confidence in MBS, the government would still then hold securities that over time would actually pay back, and the TARP investments would turn a profit. This is what ultimately happened with the Resolute Trust Corp., a government agency that bought property and oversaw the recovery from the Savings and Loan problems in the late 1980’s. Such an eventuality would mean that the trillions spent (or misspent if you’re Republican) would be paid back by the recovery in housing that will occur at some point, rather than being a burden on our children.

If you need further convincing, look to the markets. As of this writing, there are entrepreneurial financial wizards beginning to talk to the long-term investment managers about new products that will be based on the purchase of discounted MBS and ABS tranches from bank balance sheets. These smart folks have done the math and realize that taking a chunk of some discounted MBS off the bank’s hands at 30% of the value will pay off handsomely over time as the underlying mortgages are steadily paid off, even if the delinquency rate were to grow to 80%, an astronomical figure. What these folks are looking for are investors with a long enough horizon to wait until the market recovers and house values climb again to start booking their double-digit returns.

Government investment in banks and investment houses is contrary to the free market, and distasteful to most Americans. As long as the government is doing the distasteful, it should do so in a way that profits the taxpayer directly, rather than let some enterprising financiers or the banks themselves, take a windfall on the other side.

Opportunities Are Coming Back in Pittsburgh

As the weather is routinely hanging around 50 degrees there appears to be a chill in the non-residential construction market as well. While a number of high profile, big-dollar construction projects continue towards completion, there are some interesting projects being bid.

The most interesting project to come out of late is the $30 million tenant buildout of the K & L Gates space in the former Arriva building (formerly Freemarkets, formerly One Oliver Plaza, now cleverly named K & L Gates Center). Perhaps the timing for K & L isn’t so great, coming on the heels of a 5% staff reduction announcement, but for the construction industry it’s a good job.

Lehman Smith McLeish out of Washington DC is the architect on the project, which is a 240,000 sq. ft. tenant improvement with facade and plaza renovations. They have asked bids March 27 from P. J. Dick, Massaro, Rycon, Mascaro, Continental and Turner.

UPMC just let a interesting project to Allegheny Construction Group at the new Children’s Hospital campus. The work is a $10 million plus renovation to the 12-story Plaza Building which was formerly, in part, the nuns’ residence. The upper five floors will house the new Ronald McDonald House and the lower floors will be converted into offices.

Oxford Development is in the process of bidding and contracting the partial demolition of the Expo Mart to make way for new offices for Caremark, and the renovation of the former Wickes Furniture Store for use as a replacement Monroeville Convention Center. Rycon Construction is doing the Caremark work and the Wickes building, and another piece is out to bid now.

In Cranberry the Victory Family Church is using Tallahassee-based COSCO & Associates as architect/construction manager to find a team for a 128,150 sq. ft. expansion of their facility. No one has released a budget but the project will be north of $10 million.

And at the end of the month the $98 million Bethel Park High project will hit the streets.

It’s pretty clear that the recessionary forces squeezing the national economy are being felt here, but it’s also clear that there are going to be projects built in Pittsburgh anyway.

$100 Million Bethel Park School to Bid

Around March 31 the bid packages for the new Bethel Park High School will go out to bid. The project is a 3-year, 320,000 square foot job that will bid in 15 packages (plus or minus). During March there will be one or two pre-release meetings held to review the scope of the packages, particularly the unusual breakout of the general packages. The $100 million project’s construction manager, Massaro Corp., has arranged those packages to eliminate any obstacles to key critical path elements in summer 2011.

According to the Massaro, there will be a site work/utilities package worth $8-10 million, which is being bid independent of the general trades so that there are no encumberances on being prepared to do the large parking lot & landscaping wrapup in summer 2011.  There will also be a separate foundations/structural steel contract ($20 million plus) and general construction package ($30 million plus) bid.

In addition to these three contracts there will be three packages to cover food service, casework & specialty furnishing, and six mechanical & electrical related packages.

The building architect is Weber Murphy Fox from Erie. Bids will be due at the end of April.

Watch Out For the Bad News

There has been a bunch of bad economic news in the business & other press in the past couple of weeks that seems to be getting everyone in a ‘woe is me’ state of mind. Be careful of this attitude trap. Pay close attention to the details of what is being reported since most of the current round of economic data is only as current as the end of 2008. Is there anyone out there who expected good economic data after the market crash in October and November?

Yesterday’s housing price news was a great example. All around the ‘net and in print were stories echoing the headline that values fell 15% last year, a number greater than expected. First the expected number was only fractions better, and more importantly, the expected number could not have taken much into account about the realtor’s reports in November and December, when listings plummeted and refinance exploded.

There is still too much inventory for prices to rise. This isn’t good news but the fact that prices fell 15% last year is nothing more than recognition of what we really already knew. It’s a tough time to sell a house, and the sales price better reflect the market instead of the seller’s needs. Again, if this is news to anyone, congratulations on the four-month nap you’ve been taking.

Big Prisons, Big Infrastructure in the Pipeline

On February 11 Joe Biden was in the state of PA visiting some beat up bridges and drumming up support for the stimulus bill. During the visits he promised/alluded to $16 billion for PA during the next two years. The fear here is that is was Joe Biden being Joe Biden, telling the audience what it wanted to hear. On the other hand, the speech offered some insight into the plan that has allayed some worries about what the real impact on construction the stimulus bill would have.

One commonly circulated theory about the stimulus was that it would not increase infrastructure spending so much as it would replace the spending cuts that have resulted from the deficit in revenues during the past 12-18 months. Biden specified that almost an additional $2 billion would be coming to PA from the federal coffers to repair bridges and roads. Given that PA has identified over 400 structurally deficient bridges, that should help. More to the point, that amount of investment is roughly the total amount spent by PennDOT annually since the late stages of the Ridge administration. Regardless of how much slippage in construction there has been from escalating costs and declining revenues, effectively doubling the amount spent by PennDOT each year will certainly result in a net gain in infrastructure construction.

One private sector infrastructure project that is rumored to be going ahead is the construction of a second natural gas processing/distribution facility in Majorsville PA, along the West Virginia border in Washington County. Developer Mark West, who also developed a similar plant in Houston PA last year, will be soliciting turnkey proposals later this spring for design and construction of the $200 million-plus project.

In another sector, prisons, roughly $600 million is going to be contracted in our region, and more than $800 million statewide for construction of new facilities. Just south of the PA border in Hazelton WV, the Fedral Bureau of Prisons has begun the selection process for a 584,000 square foot medium security facility at FCI-Hazelton. The project is in the federal budget at $230 million. Right now the first phase proposals are being solicited for technical qualifications, and are due back March 12.

In PA the Department of General Services will be seeking design/build proposals for new facilities in three locations. According to DGS press releases the state will put out the first of these in the first half of the year. The $200 million expansion of SCI-Rockview, just east of State College, is expected to go first, with another $200 million at SCI-Fayette in German Township. In the east, a $400 million new facility is scheduled to be bid at SCI-Graterford.