The Bid Board Grew by 24 Jobs. Pricing Didn't Follow.

The bid board picked up 24 open packages overnight — 410 to 434 — and the gain wasn't scattered. New Jersey DOT alone grew to 18 open postings, NJ Treasury's DPMC added to 9, and Dormitory Authority climbed to 15. If you chase public work in the tri-state footprint, this is the first week in a while the pipeline actually got longer instead of shorter.

None of that moved the price of anything. Average bidder count sits at 9.4, same as the prior cycle. Low bids are still landing 31.7% under engineers' estimates on average — identical to yesterday's read. More packages hitting the street hasn't loosened competition or softened pricing yet, and one overnight jump isn't enough data to say it will. Call it a supply signal, not a demand signal.

“Brooklyn and Queens look similar by filing count. By dollars, Queens is where the big-ticket filings are clustering.”

The more interesting number sits outside the bid board entirely. NYC Department of Buildings logged 12,369 job filings in the trailing 30 days, and the dollars are lopsided in a way the filing count alone doesn't show. Manhattan filed 4,517 applications worth $1.5 billion. Queens filed far fewer — 2,549 — but those filings carry $1.17 billion, nearly as much money as Manhattan on about half the paperwork. Brooklyn filed more jobs than Queens (3,308) for less than three-quarters the dollars ($843 million).

Queens is punching above its filing count because of a handful of enormous jobs. A $350 million alteration-with-certificate-of-occupancy filing on 31st Avenue and a $124 million alteration tied to NYC Economic Development Corp on Roosevelt Avenue are both sitting in that borough's 30-day window, alongside a $70 million new school building on 155th Street for the School Construction Authority. Three filings, well over half a billion dollars, one borough.

For a GC or sub sizing up where to chase work, filing count and filing value are telling two different stories right now. Brooklyn and Queens look similar by volume. By dollars, Queens is where the big-ticket filings are clustering, and a trio of public and quasi-public filings — SCA, EDC — are doing a lot of that lifting.

What this means for you: More open packages right now doesn't mean looser competition or softer pricing — price your next bid off the 9.4-bidder, 31.7%-under-estimate norm, not off the headline growth in postings. If you work Queens, the dollar concentration says look for large public and EDC-linked filings, not just raw filing volume. How we count: Open-bid totals and bid-result averages come from the live board as of October 18; DOB figures cover job applications filed in the trailing 30 days by filing date, not permits issued or construction started.