Category: Construction Bond

How Often Do You Pay for Surety Bonds?

Surety bonds are widely used in industries such as construction, government contracting, energy and utilities, real estate, and finance to provide project owners, clients, and regulatory bodies assurance against loss. Because surety bonds and insurance have some features in common, it’s not unusual for people purchasing a surety bond for the first time to assume they can pay for it in monthly premium payments, like they pay for their insurance policies. But that’s not generally the case.  

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8 Best Ways to Minimize Profit Fade in Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. What Is Profit Fade? No contractor wants to discover that they aren’t going to make as much profit on a project as initially estimated. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find that the profit margin for a given construction project shrinks or even disappears by the time work is completed. It’s even more unfortunate that sometimes, that “profit fade” doesn’t become apparent until it’s too late to do much about it.  Project owners and surety bond providers typically require periodic financial reports showing the percentage of project completion and the profit recognized as of each reporting date. In a perfect world, those percentages match—when 50% of a project has been completed, 50% of the total estimated profit has been recognized, and so on. At the end of the project, when 100% of the work has been completed, and 100% of the estimated profit has been recognized. It’s when 100% of the profit has been recognized before 100% of the work...

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How Big Data Improves Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. What Is Big Data? Oracle defines “big data” as larger, more complex data sets that are so voluminous that traditional data processing software can’t manage them. Big data provides the basis for addressing business problems previously too difficult to tackle.  The “three V’s” help explain the challenges inherent in working with big data. Volume refers to the enormous amount of data—for example, in databases containing BIM and 3-D modeling files and from continuous collection of data from sensor-equipped equipment and PPE. Some organizations are dealing with terabytes of data, while for others, it may be hundreds of petabytes.  Velocity describes the speed at which data are created and collected and perhaps acted upon, potentially in real-time.  Variety is all about the different kinds of data points involved—traditionally structured data in a relational database and, increasingly, new unstructured and semi-structured data that require additional processing to derive meaningful insights. Since these three V’s were delineated, three more V’s have emerged:...

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Fintech Trends for Construction Finance in 2023

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. What Is Fintech? Fintech (short for financial technology) is defined as technology that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. It has expanded from its origins in automating the “back office” operations of banks and other large financial institutions. It is now used by companies in many sectors to manage their financial operations and processes. In recent years Fintech has been gaining traction in the construction sector. Key Financial Services for Construction There are three key financial services in construction in which value is estimated and exchanged—payments, lending, and insurance. All three involve significant pain points for construction contractors and other stakeholders. Contractors, suppliers, workers, project owners, investors, and lenders all want the same outcome: on-time completion. But at the same time, certain conflicts of interest that are baked into the process can prevent them from achieving that shared goal.  Conflicts of Interest For example, contractors want to be paid based on tasks completed...

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Predicting Asphalt Pricing in Construction: The New App

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. The Problem One of the most difficult aspects of running a construction contracting business is estimating costs with enough accuracy to submit a winning bid that provides a comfortable profit margin. The challenge is that the prices of building materials are dynamic, often changing in ways that are difficult to predict. The price of asphalt is one such moving target. It’s easy enough to figure out how much the asphalt for a certain project will cost at the time a bid is submitted. But months can go by between the time a winning bidder is chosen and the time the project breaks ground. And during those intervening months, the price the contractor must pay for asphalt may have changed significantly. The Solution One person with more than 30 years of experience in highway and heavy construction decided to do something to make it easier to predict the price of asphalt. Brian Lawrence recognized the inherent difficulty of predicting what...

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The Growing Need for ESG Reporting in Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. What is ESG? ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance,” specifically corporate governance. The abbreviation refers to the standards that enable organizations of all kinds to measure and track progress toward ESG-related internal and external initiatives, such as net-zero carbon goals. Today, ESG standards are most commonly used by investors looking for socially conscious companies to invest in. ESG standards help them determine a company’s: Commitment to safeguarding the environment and preserving the natural world Consideration of people and their interdependencies, including treatment of employees, management of supplier relationships, and impact on the communities within which they operate Logistics and process for operating the business, such as leadership practices, executive compensation, financial transparency, and shareholder rights Taken together, these factors reflect a company’s commitment to sustainability and accountability, which are growing concerns for all organizations, including those in the construction industry. Why Is ESG an Issue in Construction? Project owners, investors, lenders, developers, and building contractors all have good...

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What Contractors Need to Do to Bid on Larger Projects

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Are You Ready to Make the Move? To land bigger projects, you have to get bigger. That’s a simplistic way to say that you must demonstrate the capacity to successfully execute any project you bid on. If you’re hoping to grow your business by winning bids on bigger jobs, you’ll need to prove that you have sufficient capital, equipment, workers, construction industry experience, administrative and management talent, credit, bonding capacity, and whatever else it will take to convince project owners that you have what it takes to run with the big dogs. You’ll also need to have subcontractors and suppliers with the capacity to meet your needs. If the ones you’ve been working with can’t scale up to support you on larger projects, you may have to expand your network. Cash Flow Considerations The bigger the project, the more important it is to be able to estimate and track costs accurately. That can be significantly more difficult for larger...

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How Emerging Contractors Can Master the Bidding Process

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. The Procurement Process Different project owners go about hiring contractors in different ways. The federal process is formal and highly regulated to ensure that it is fair for all parties while minimizing the risk to the government. The same is generally true of the process used to hire contractors to execute state-funded and municipal-funded public works projects. New contractors need to thoroughly understand the process to be used for a particular project before preparing and submitting a bid. All of the time, effort, and money that goes into preparing a bid is wasted if the contractor is disqualified for not following the correct process. Bid Solicitations Not all bids are advertised publicly for open bidding by any contractor. While government-funded projects typically are, some project owners, especially private ones, only advertise bids to contractors who previously went through a vetting process to be on a list of prequalified bidders. Open bidding, also known as open tendering, is an “equal...

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Advances of Technology in the Bidding Process for Procurement

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. The Procurement Process In the business world, organizations typically refer to the process through which they acquire goods and services or “purchasing.” Government agencies refer to the process through which they obtain what they need, from aircraft to paper clips, as “procurement.” Selecting a contractor to carry out a government-funded construction process falls into the procurement category. Government procurement at the federal level is carried out according to well-defined procedures and is highly regulated to ensure that it is fair for all parties while minimizing the risk to the government. The same is generally true of the process used to hire contractors to execute state-funded and municipal-funded public works projects. New contractors need to thoroughly understand the process to be used for a particular project before preparing and submitting a bid. All of the time, effort, and money that goes into preparing a bid is wasted if the contractor is disqualified for not following the correct procedures or providing...

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IIJA Funding and Cyber Security Risks in Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. The Threat of Cyber Attack Cybersecurity experts have warned us for several years of the threat that cyber attacks pose to critical infrastructure and those who rely on it. Water supplies, electrical grids, banking, and communication systems are particularly vulnerable to disruption through cyber attacks. Sensitive personal and corporate information can be acquired through data breaches and sold, held for ransom, or used for other nefarious purposes. The construction industry is far from immune to cyber attacks. In 2021, construction was the third most frequently targeted industry as far as ransomware is concerned, accounting for 13.2% of all ransomware attacks in North America. It’s a favored target because of a lack of awareness and inadequate cybersecurity measures. One study found 74% of businesses in the construction industry are unprepared to respond to a cyber attack, despite the abundance of sensitive data and financial information they accumulate. And as the use of artificial intelligence and degree of connectivity in construction...

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