The RFI Wire's bid board listed 353 open solicitations on October 30, down from 381 the prior cycle — a drop of 28 postings in a single overnight pull.
Most of that swing traces to a handful of agencies whose counts moved in round numbers rather than to a wave of awards or withdrawals. The Dormitory Authority of the State of New York went from 15 open postings to 13. NYS Thruway Authority held at five. MTA Construction & Development stayed at six. New Jersey Treasury's Division of Property Management & Construction ticked from 8 to 7. None of those are the kind of move that comes from a single big contract closing out — they read like routine housekeeping on agency-side postings, the normal churn of bids closing and new ones not yet replacing them.
“None of those are the kind of move that comes from a single big contract closing out.”
The agencies with the largest standing inventories barely budged. The State University of New York still shows 19 open postings, same as the cycle before. The NYS Office of People with Developmental Disabilities held at 11. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' combined postings stayed at 12. NYS General Services held at 11. The trade breakdown moved the same way: General Construction slipped from 36 open postings to 33, Roofing from 15 to 14, Structural/Steel from 14 to 11 — each a small step down, none a cliff.
The one category that grew is the one that tells you the least: postings with no agency or trade specified climbed from 68 unspecified-agency listings to 59 tagged "Unspecified" on the agency side, while unspecified-trade postings fell slightly from 116 to 122. Categorization on the board is still catching up to volume faster than volume itself is moving.
Bid-result data — bidder counts, spreads, low bid versus engineer's estimate — carried over unchanged this cycle at 1,000 tabulated results, an average of 8.3 bidders per job, a 22.8% average spread between low and second bid, and low bids landing 4.7% under the engineer's estimate on average. Nothing in the results pool refreshed between pulls, so there's no new pricing signal to report alongside the inventory drop.
What this means for you: A board-wide dip like this isn't a sign of a dry spell — check the specific agencies you track rather than reading the total count as a market signal. How we count: Open-bid totals compare two consecutive As-Built pulls of the live bid board, one day apart; bid-result stats (bidder counts, spreads, low-vs-estimate) are drawn from the same 1,000-record sample in both cycles and did not refresh between pulls.