New look Constructioneconomics.org – Coming Soon

September 27, 2012 1 Comment

The change in seasons has invigorated me to make undertake a more structured (and ultimately more useful) approach to Constructioneconimics.org, as I shall expound below:

To start with, you will soon notice some pleasing (and much needed) aesthetic modifications to the site including a new logo (which may or may not look something like the one below that I have just whipped up on Excel in an attempt to generate some interest!), new colours, and an updated theme.

More importantly, I am starting some new mini-projects that will warrant systematic weekly and monthly uploads, namely:

–          Tabulated and visualised share price data relating to UK listed Construction & Materials, Support Services, and Real Estate companies. This will include weekly fluctuation in share price and some nifty visuals. I hope this table will eventually become interactive once I have gained sufficient web coding power!

–          Weekly share price heat maps of the above companies. Again, this will hopefully become interactive after a few months.

–          Company Click – a detailed monthly insight into a selected company, which will include a bio, some visualisations and charts of historic stock performance, speculation on future price and investment ideas.  

–          Interactive map of UK construction – more on this to follow in the coming months (this is rather ambitious undertaking and may take a bit longer to galvanise).

So there you have it. The new features will of course be interposed with the usual visualisations and commentary on interesting construction data and the like. I will tweet about new posts as and when they happen (@guy_beaumont). Any questions or comments are, or course, very welcome.

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UK Constuction Industry Market Analysis Sources

September 17, 2012 Leave a comment

These headlines have become commonplace and reflect the current shabby state of the wider economy and the sentiment of many construction firms. Indeed, many of us can feel the diminution of positive sentiment in our everyday roles but for many firms it seems to be business as usual. The turmoil of the economy means different things to different companies. For some it may even provide business opportunity. So how do we measure the economic health of the whole construction industry with any accuracy?

To answer my own question…..we use the best data available to us.

This post documents some of the sources of data that I use every week to keep track of construction industry trend and sentiment. Much like an investment analyst or trader tracks key data and news feeds relating to the wider economy, particular company performance, or a specific currency pair, I like to keep up to date on the economic health of the industry within which I practice the most. I don’t have multiple screens running stochastic simulations on construction indices but I do take the occasional look at some of data provided by the following sources.

As you will see, I have listed some pros and cons of each source and attempted to assign each a crude score. Comparison is a tricky one – each medium is very different and often serves a unique purpose (how do you compare the ONS to Construction News?) so I have scored them based on four common criteria in an attempt to demonstrate usefulness by highlighting strengths and weaknesses.

These are subjective views and comments are, of course, very welcome.

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