Now here's a number worth sitting with: 731 bid results have come through our board this cycle. That's enough volume to actually trust the averages instead of guessing off a handful of tabs.

Across all of it, the average job draws 10.9 bidders. That's a real bid room, not two guys and a folding table. The average low bid comes in 15.9% below the second-place number — so there's real daylight between whoever wins and whoever's next in line. But here's the one that should make you sit up: the average low bid lands just 1.6% under the engineer's estimate. Estimators aren't guessing high or low right now. They're landing almost exactly on the number the agency wrote down before the job ever hit the street.

“The average low bid landed just 1.6% under the engineer's estimate — nobody's getting away with a lazy number right now.”

That tightness matters. When a market's confused — material costs jumping around, everybody throwing darts — you see low bids come in 10, 15, 20 points off the engineer's number, in either direction. A gap this close to zero says the opposite: contractors, agencies, and their engineers are all reading the same market the same way right now. If you're pricing the next job off this board, that's useful information. The estimate probably isn't padded, and it probably isn't a lowball either.

A caveat, because it matters: this is The RFI Wire's own tracked results, not a certified state registry. Of the 731, 619 don't carry a clean agency tag — that's just the nature of a board this size, and coverage depth varies by who posts consistently. But of the ones we can name an owner for, two accounts for most of it: CUNY shows up 55 times, NYS Office of Mental Health another 27. Between them, that's nearly three-quarters of every result where we can actually name the agency — and both run their capital work through DASNY. Dorms, academic buildings, psychiatric facility upgrades, moving through one financing conduit.

For an estimator, the takeaway isn't complicated: DASNY-backed CUNY and OMH work is where the recorded volume is, and the spread data says nobody's getting away with a lazy number on either side of the estimate. Price it straight — 10.9 competitors on the average job are pricing it straight too.