The open bid board dropped by 13 jobs overnight, from 440 down to 427, while the pricing numbers underneath it barely twitched. Average bidders per job held at 8.3. The average spread between low and second bid stayed at 22.8%. Low bids are still running 4.7% under the engineer's estimate, the same gap as yesterday.
So the board got smaller but the market didn't change shape. New Jersey DOT and its Treasury counterpart, the Division of Property Management & Construction, are still the two biggest single sources of bid results in the system — 101 and 74 results respectively out of the latest 1,000-result sample. New York's own school authority, NYC SCA, sits third with 42. Those three alone account for more than a fifth of every recorded result the board is tracking right now.
“The board got smaller overnight. The market underneath it didn't move.”
On the open side, SUNY posted 23 live solicitations, DASNY has 16, and OGS carries 11 — the same institutional names that have anchored the board for weeks. The unspecified-agency and unspecified-trade categories are still enormous (79 of 427 open bids carry no listed agency, 289 of 427 carry no listed trade), which says more about how these postings get filed than about where the actual work is.
What moved was volume, not price. A 3% drop in total open postings with pricing metrics frozen in place means firms aren't seeing more or less competition for the jobs still open — they're just seeing fewer of them today than yesterday.
What this means for you: Don't read the smaller board as softer competition — price the next job assuming the same 8-ish bidders and the same roughly 23% spread you've seen all week. How we count: Figures come from The RFI Wire's own bid board, comparing today's open-bid count and the trailing 1,000-result averages against the same figures pulled one day earlier.