CHICAGO May 1, 2023 – Ranking: Money and Power flow as Chicago builders manage uneven recovery
Despite a host of challenges, the Windy City’s general contractors saw year-over-year gains
Chicago’s developers kept general contractors busy last year, feeding the city’s top construction firms twice the work they did in 2021 even as the office sector floundered.
Combined, the city’s top five contractors booked more than $2 billion in work from March 10, 2022, to March 10, 2023, a huge jump compared to The Real Deal’s 2021 ranking, when the top five failed to meet the $1 billion threshold.
Power Construction, a Chicago-based fixture at the top of the city’s contractor market, led the charge by securing more than half of the project volume among the top five contractors with $1 billion worth of work last year, according to an analysis by TRD of reported costs on applications for city building permits submitted within the analyzed time frame. Power ranked second last year.
For Skender CEO Justin Brown, whose firm recorded more than $277 million of work during the period, it’s a question of whether pandemic-induced challenges, such as supply chain issues, have improved.
“For us, the supply chain is more predictable, it’s just a lot longer now with global and pent-up demand,” Brown said. “We haven’t figured out if it’s gotten better or if we’ve gotten better at adapting to it.”
Chicago’s overall construction market is projected to grow by 1.5 percent this year, with infrastructure and healthcare work expanding their market shares as the residential and commercial markets slip, according to the research arm of the construction consultancy Cumming.
“What we’ve been seeing in the industry is that a lot of general contractors do have healthy backlogs
and there seems to be several reasons for that, but there are concerns
in the commercial market that they’re going to see a slowdown due to
higher interest rates and general uncertainty,” said Michael Cwienkala,
president of the Chicagoland Associated General Contractors trade group.
