Built by someone who has been on both sides of the crew.

Construction Recon is construction market intelligence for the people who staff, supply, finance, insure and sell to contractors. We publish what is being built in a market, who is building it, and what the labor to build it costs.

Why it exists

Everyone selling into construction is working from the same thin picture. A project is announced, and months later somebody finds out which general contractor won it. By the time the trade contractors under that general contractor are known, the crews are already hired, the rental order is already placed, and the supplier who wanted the business is calling a jobsite that is half finished.

The information exists. It is scattered across a market, it arrives in fragments, and no single fragment is worth acting on alone. Our work is assembling those fragments into one picture, confirming each attribution against independent sources, and dating it, so a person can pick up the phone with a name and a reason to call.

Who runs it

Construction Recon was founded by Larry Bailey. He started as a Navy electrician, spent about ten years in the oilfield splitting his time between field service and data analysis, then moved into skilled-trades staffing. He managed a staffing company, then built his own to seven million dollars in revenue in four years, until a client defaulted on a million dollars of labor already worked and he had to close it.

That combination is the reason this product looks the way it does. He has been the person cold-calling a jobsite for a name, and the person who ate a loss that better information would have caught earlier. He also builds and operates RoadTrades, a job marketplace for traveling tradespeople, which is where our labor and pay data comes from.

What we publish

Three product lines, sold market by market. Labor Radar covers which contractors are hiring, for which trades, and what the work pays. Construction Radar covers commercial and industrial buildings, with the general contractor and the trade contractors working under them. Infrastructure Radar covers highway, energy and fiber work, including who won it and who bid against them. The Construction Beat is the periodic digest across whichever Radars a subscriber holds, and the Full Market Report puts both halves of a metro in one document: the work and the workforce.

How we work

• Confirmed beats fast. An attribution is published when independent sources agree on it, and every row says how confident we are and when it was confirmed. The method is on how we confirm.
• We name the work, not the workforce vendors. We identify contractors doing the building. We do not publish the staffing suppliers who serve them, and a subscriber's own activity is never product.
• We will back any row. Challenge an attribution and we will show our work for it.
• One market at a time. A market opens when its picture is whole enough to sell honestly, not when a map looks impressive.

Where we are

Construction Recon is operated from Ohio and covers United States construction markets. Our first market is Central Ohio, which is also where the method was built and tested.